Just before the tough, conflict-filled year that was 2023 was set to expire, it inflicted on us one final misfortune before taking its leave from the stage of history: it took away from us one of our finest actors, the great Tom Wilkinson, the backbone of numerous Oscar-winning movies and Emmy-winning TV series.
Born in Yorkshire, England, as Geoffrey Thomas Wilkinson on Feb. 5, 1948, Wilkinson was by his own account a somewhat directionless child who, after some guidance from a benevolent high school teacher, developed an interest in theater. After attending college at the University of Kent and training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Wilkinson earned a spot in the Royal Shakespeare Company, which enabled him to launch his career in British theater and TV in the mid-1970s. Choosing to go by his middle name, Wilkinson acted on the British stage and screen for years alongside Helen Mirren and other luminaries, but his own stardom would not come for nearly another two decades. His endearing role in the independent British comedy The Full Monty, one of the surprise hits of 1997, opened mainstream moviemakers’ eyes to Wilkinson’s talents, leading to significant roles in prestige films such as Shakespeare in Love and In the Bedroom as well as in big-budget blockbusters such as Rush Hour and Batman Begins.
Often described as a “character actor” during his mainstream movie career, Wilkinson was a far more refined actor with a far greater range than that backhanded compliment would lead one to believe. His six BAFTA (British Academy Film Awards) nominations, which include one win, and praise from George Clooney, who described him as “the epitome of excellence” who “made every project better,” testify to the high esteem in which his fellow actors held him.
Wilkinson’s best movie role, and the role of his that will likely be mentioned first in the vast majority of obituaries, was his indelible performance as a litigator gone rogue whom Clooney’s law-firm-fixer character is tasked with handling in Tony Gilroy’s superb 2007 drama Michael Clayton. Wilkinson’s portrayal of a lawyer who had suffered a nervous breakdown yet who still had enough wits about him to try ardently to get those around him to face up to the truth earned Wilkinson his second and final Oscar nomination, and appears to have been part of the inspiration for the Chuck McGill character in Better Call Saul.
While Wilkinson’s terrific turn as Attorney Arthur Edens undoubtedly represents the apogee of his career in movies, his best performance, at least in my opinion, came in a TV series. In 2008, Wilkinson joined the cast of HBO’s adaptation of David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams. While the star of the series was understandably Paul Giamatti’s unforgettable Adams, the show would never have done as well as it did without Wilkinson’s Emmy Award-winning performance as Benjamin Franklin.
Wilkinson’s Franklin, played with the perfect combination of American-everyman simplicity and suave, international man of affairs, was the perfect foil for Giamatti’s gruff, begrudging Adams. The patriotic purists among us might bemoan the fact that Wilkinson helped initiate a trend of Brits playing our greatest heroes, from Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln to David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. (Though we recently returned the favor when John Lithgow played Winston Churchill in The Crown.) But Wilkinson’s endlessly entertaining Franklin was also edifying, and even educational.
Playing next to (and off of) Giamatti’s sterner, oft-sardonic Adams, the British Wilkinson helped us understand the sui generis panache the first American on the world stage possessed that vexed Adams to such an extent that it caused the frequently flummoxed second president of the United States to speculate that when future historians would tell the story of the American Revolution, their narrative would go something as follows: “Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them — Franklin, Washington, and the horse — conducted the entire revolution by themselves.” After watching Wilkinson in John Adams, you might be left with the impression that while Benjamin Franklin may have not exactly performed these kinds of miracles, his role in the creation of the United States of America was no less magical.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.