Gary Oldman Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth & Biography

Gary Oldman is an English actor known for disappearing into his roles, from Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy to Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Born on March 21, 1958, in New Cross, London, England, Oldman, 68, is one of the most versatile actors of his generation, equally convincing as a punk-rock star, a vampire, a spy and a prime minister.

Quick Facts

Who Is Gary Oldman?

Gary Oldman is an actor whose best performances are often the ones where you forget you are watching Gary Oldman. He has played a punk singer, a corrupt policeman, a vampire, a wizard, a spy chief and a prime minister, and in each case he has changed his voice, his walk, his face and his manner so completely that audiences have sometimes not recognised him. He first reached a wide audience as Sid Vicious, the bassist of the Sex Pistols, in Sid and Nancy (1986), a performance that was both raw and sympathetic, and he went on to play Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK (1991), Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the villain Norman Stansfield in Léon: The Professional (1994), a role that is still remembered for its manic energy.

To a younger audience, Oldman is best known as Sirius Black, Harry Potter’s godfather, in the Harry Potter films, and as Commissioner James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, a role that showed his ability to play a decent, steady man in a world of chaos. He has also played George Smiley, the spy, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), a performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination, and Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017), a performance that won him the Oscar for Best Actor and required hours of prosthetic make-up. In recent years he has starred as Jackson Lamb, the dishevelled, brilliant head of a group of disgraced spies, in the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, a role that has brought him a new generation of fans and a series of awards.

Early Life & Background

Gary Oldman was born in New Cross, in south-east London, England, the son of Leonard Bertram Oldman, a welder who left the family when Oldman was seven, and Kathleen Cheriton, a homemaker. He grew up in a working-class household and attended West Greenwich School in Deptford, where he was known as a bright, restless pupil. He was drawn to acting as a teenager, after seeing Malcolm McDowell in the film The Raging Moon (1971), and he studied at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in Sidcup, graduating in 1979 with a BA in theatre arts.

After drama school, Oldman worked on stage, including with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Royal Court Theatre, where he appeared in plays by Edward Bond and others. He made his film debut in Remembrance (1982) and appeared in Sid and Nancy in 1986, a film that made him a star in Britain. He worked in Prick Up Your Ears (1987), in which he played the playwright Joe Orton, and in State of Grace (1990), and he moved to the United States in the early 1990s, where he became known for playing villains in films such as JFK, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Léon, a reputation that he has often said he found both flattering and limiting.

Career

Oldman’s career has been one of constant reinvention. After his early villain roles, he played Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994), a heroic pilot in Air Force One (1997), and a congressman in The Contender (2000), which brought him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. He played Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and in later films in the series, and he played Commissioner Gordon in Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), a role that showed his ability to play a moral centre in a large, commercial film.

He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which he played George Smiley with great restraint, and he won the Oscar for Darkest Hour, in which he played Churchill during the early days of the Second World War. He has also directed a film, Nil by Mouth (1997), a semi-autobiographical drama about working-class life in south-east London, which won him the BAFTA for Best British Film. In Slow Horses, he plays Jackson Lamb, a spy chief who is rude, unkempt and brilliant, a role that has earned him a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA nomination. He has been married five times and has three sons: Alfie, from his marriage to Lesley Manville, and Gulliver and Charlie, from his marriage to Donya Fiorentino. He married his fifth wife, Gisele Schmidt, a writer and art curator, in 2017.

Facts About Gary Oldman

• He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Darkest Hour in 2018, playing Winston Churchill.
• He played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films and Commissioner Gordon in the Dark Knight trilogy.
• He directed Nil by Mouth (1997), which won the BAFTA for Best British Film.
• He stars as Jackson Lamb in the series Slow Horses.
• He studied at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in Sidcup, graduating in 1979.

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