Brian Cox’s Churchill: a weary and uncertain wartime hero

Brian Cox plays a version of the wartime leader who, on the eve of D-Day, is weary and full of uncertainty.

Brian Cox, who stars as Britain’s wartime leader in Churchill. Picture: David Geraghty

When it came to playing Winston Churchill, Scottish actor Brian Cox had plenty of reference points. He thinks of him as a man of destiny, a renaissance figure, a supreme orator — as well as a haunted man, a lonely child and a cartoon character from an American television series.

Churchill, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, confines itself to a short, intense period during World War II: its events take place in June 1944, shortly before D-Day and the Allied landings in Normandy.

Churchill, the British prime minister, is 69. A few years earlier he’d been a figure of unity during the Blitz, but now he’s fragile, exhausted and full of doubt. He is convinced the military plans for D-Day are flawed, and he is haunted by memories of the Gallipoli campaign he presided over during World War I, when so many lives were lost.

Cox plays Churchill as fragile, exhausted and full of doubt.

Screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann, in her feature film debut, explores the gap between the public and private man, Cox says, and he threw himself with relish into investigating both.

Playing Churchill, he suggests, draws on many kinds of detail.

“You need to put the picture together … He was a renaissance man, he embraced language, he was a great rhetorical speaker.” In Churchill, we see a man who carefully rehearses not only speeches but also arguments; and when he prays for bad weather, he can’t help turning to Shakespeare to bolster his case.

Cox with Miranda Richardson, who plays Churchill's wife.

Miranda Richardson, as Churchill’s wife, Clemmie, portrays a crucial figure behind the scenes: enabling and patient, but with a strong, decisive sense of her role in her husband’s life. “She’s fantastic in the film and I couldn’t have hoped to have anybody better,” Cox says.

During his preparation, Cox watched footage of the 1954 unveiling of a controversial Churchill portrait by Graham Sutherland, commissioned for Churchill’s 80th birthday. The painting’s fate told him a lot about Churchill and his wife, he says. Clemmie thought the portrait was undignified.

“She was a protector of his legacy, and she got the painting, and she burned it,” he says. She took charge of it and arranged for its destruction rather than allowing it to hang at Westminster, as intended.

Control of the Churchill legacy has had many ramifications, Cox says. It has meant the British prime minister’s opposition to D-Day has only recently become widely known.

Danny Webb as Alan Brooke with Cox as the British prime minister.

here are many ways into a character, Cox says. But reflecting on the experience of childhood is particularly important for him in playing Churchill, who was a lonely child. His omnipresent cigar was an adult version of thumb-sucking, and his wife played a maternal role in his life.

“They say all babies look like Winston Churchill and Winston Churchill looks like all babies,” Cox says. Watching the cartoon series Family Guy with his teenage sons, Cox saw the character of Stewie, a baby with a wide vocabulary, an upper-class English accent and intense frustration with the wider world. Cox thought, “That’s Churchill. The voice! The kid who’s not understood!”

The early years are key to who we are, Cox says, “and you lose the child in you at your own peril”. He has strong images from his childhood that he can summon. “I’ve got photographs of me when I’m three and five and seven, my first communion photographs. There is a wonderful photograph of my father sitting on my trike and helping to put a flower in a buttonhole on my lapel, and he’s doing it very carefully.”

Cox made his name in the theatre, spending years with the Royal Shakespeare Company before moving to the US to pursue a film career. His philosophy about work was formed in his early years, he says. “I had a wonderful actor friend, Fulton Mackay, who played the tramp in Local Hero.” (Bill Forsyth’s much-loved 1983 international hit, set on a small Scottish island.)

“I was ambitious when I was young, I was on the make, I wanted to do things. He said to me, ‘Dinna worry about being the star, just say your prayers and be a good actor.’ And I thought, ‘Yes, I just have to do the work, that’s its own reward.’ And once you make that compact, everything changes. You don’t have to fall into the usual mindset of how your career has to be. It’s always a case of letting go. Ten years later, I decided to move to New York.”

Not everyone understood his decision. Cox remembers talking about his departure with Nigel Hawthorne, a stalwart of the Royal Court Theatre, who was to become famous as Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister and receive an Oscar nomination for The Madness of King George. Hawthorne couldn’t understand why Cox would want to leave. “He said, ‘I don’t know how you can do that. You had this great classical career and you’ve decided to go for films.’

“I said, ‘I’m not snobbish about it, I just like to work. I know what I’ve done, and it’s great, it’s fed me spiritually, it’s fed me in every way. But I don’t have to repeat it.’ ”

The roles have been there — indeed, Cox says, he now finds himself more in demand than ever. “Last year was the hardest year I’ve ever worked, and I was 70. Most people think that’s when it starts to tail off, but it’s not been the case. And I have to watch it.”

Cox as the original Hannibal Lecktor in 1986’s Manhunter.

Cox played Hannibal Lecter first, before Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning turn in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. In 1986 Cox was Hannibal Lecktor in Manhunter, Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. His Hannibal is younger, quicker and with a lighter touch than Hopkins’s — less self-conscious, more understated but no less powerful.

Casting director Bonnie Timmermann had brought him to Mann’s attention. Cox has described how she saw him in a play but was so far back in the theatre that she could barely see him. It was his voice that caught her attention.

When Timmermann got him to audition for the part, she asked him to start with his back to the camera, telling him that she wanted Mann to hear his voice first.

Cox has played several real-life characters: Trotsky (in his first feature, Nicholas and Alexandra), Joseph Stalin, Matt Busby, J. Edgar Hoover. In Spike Jonze’s Adaptation he played screenwriting guru Robert McKee; he also provided the voice of Zen philosopher Alan Watts in Jonze’s Her.

He was in X-Men 2 and Rushmore, he has played military men, spies and villains, and sometimes all three at once. In Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E., in which Paul Dano made his screen debut, he gave a memorable performance as a middle-aged man drawn to teenage boys.

He has continued to work in the theatre and through the years he has taught acting. One of his most acclaimed roles has been King Lear; he has written a book, The Lear Diaries, following a 1991 production that went on a world tour, on the demands of the role.

Cox has adult children from his first marriage, teenage boys from his second. “I don’t think I’m a particularly good father,” he says. “I’m confused by fatherhood sometimes. But what I am is a good teacher. I’ve put my paternal stuff into my teaching and I teach very much from that viewpoint.”

Cox in a scene from the 2009 film The Escapist.

Sometimes the teaching role has been official, sometimes more informal. In 2008, he starred in and executive-produced The Escapist, the first feature for English filmmaker Rupert Wyatt. It’s a taut, intense thriller about a prisoner serving a life sentence. Discovering that his estranged daughter is close to death, he is determined to escape and see her one last time, but to get out of jail he needs to build a new set of relationships. Wyatt intercuts the preparation for the escape and the escape itself.

Cox had worked on a Wyatt short film and Wyatt brought him a script for his first feature — but the role was not the lead. “I don’t mind supporting roles,” Cox says. “But occasionally, I’m a pretty good centre-forward.”

He talked to Wyatt about “Spencer Tracy, my hero, one of the great character actors of all time, who was also a leading man. He had the only career I’d ever envy. I just loved him. He’s a great comedian, the common man, the kind of actor I would want to be.”

Cox told Wyatt to look at one of Tracy’s best known films, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), in which Tracy plays a man who arrives at a remote small town in search of someone whose existence the townspeople seem determined to deny. “So he went off, because he’s a smart kid, he saw it, said yes, and wrote this script.

“He showed it to me and I read it and thought, ‘wow, this is brilliant, I want to act in it, but I want to produce it.’ I’m not a money producer, I’m a creative producer.

“And I said, ‘I want to hold on to this script because I know people will tell you to write a different film. They’re all going to love it but they’ll give you their notes, and the notes are going to take you away from your point. I don’t want to lose what this is. This is the one we’re going to make.’ ”

He’s proud of the film, he says: “It was a really bold idea. The only problem was that not enough people saw it.”

One of his best experiences, he says, was a teaching role that was potentially well outside his comfort zone. He was working with the RSC and was involved with the British American Drama Academy. Members of the Moscow Arts Theatre came to BADA, including actor and artistic director Oleg Yefremov. “I asked if I could watch them, I’d like to come and observe, and Oleg said, ‘No, you must come and teach.’ He had seen my classes.

“I teach a lot of drama, but I’m not a dictator. With young actors, my teaching is about creating a space so that they can feel relaxed and be creative.”

Cox went to Russia and did a series of classes on Shakespeare, then was invited back to stage a production, and he chose The Crucible, directing it across the course of a year, travelling back and forth.

“It was life-changing for me. It reinforced ideas that I had about language and the truth of emotion. I had a wonderful time with these extraordinary students, who were like gold dust.”

Thirty years on, Cox returned to Moscow and met many of his students again. He has made a TV series, Brian Cox’s Russia, which recently went to air in Britain. “The first episode hinges on the reunion. And it was amazing. My young actors are now stars.” They talked to him about the experience of working with him, he says. “They value it to this day. It changed in their lives, they say, and it changed mine.”

One of his next projects is a TV series with HBO called Succession, directed by Adam McKay (The Big Short) and written by Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show, The Thick of It).

“It’s about a media family and I play the patriarch. There’s a daughter and there are two sons. It’s a blackly comic drama about ruthlessness,” Cox says. His character declares he’s going to step down and let his family run the business, then changes his mind. There are some roles, it seems, that Cox will always return to. “It’s King Lear all over again,” he says.

Churchill opens on Thursday.

David Stratton reviews Churchill next weekend.