Gary Oldman | Biography, Movies, & Facts (2024)

Gary Oldman (born March 21, 1958, London, England) is an English film actor known for his chameleonic ability to evince characters ranging from nebbishes to snarling villains.

Oldman was raised in a working-class family in London, the youngest of three children. After leaving school at age 16, he began acting in productions staged by the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre. He attended the Rose Bruford Training College for Speech and Drama (now the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance) on scholarship, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1979. After starring in repertory productions in York and Colchester, he was accepted as a member of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, appearing in such productions as Massacre at Paris (1980) and Chinchilla (1980). Oldman returned to London, where he continued to pursue theater work. Meanwhile, he made his film debut in Remembrance (1982). He then embarked upon a series of performances at the Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Theatre; his 1985 performance as Scopey in Edward Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding at the former venue won particular acclaim.

In 1986 Oldman turned in a star-making performance as drug-ravaged Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious in the film Sid and Nancy. He later played doomed playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and Rosencrantz in the film adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). His work in several American films led to roles as assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK (1991) and as the title character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Oldman’s cameo as a patois-spouting, dreadlocked drug dealer in the Tony Scott bloodbath True Romance (1993) helped solidify his American following. He won further praise for his restrained portrayal of Ludwig van Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994).

Oldman’s capacity for physical transformation and multifarious means of conveying menace led to a string of villainous roles. He prowled the screen as a slickly coiffed agent of evil in the Luc Besson-directed sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element (1997) and schemed against a liberal vice presidential nominee as a corrupt senator in The Contender (2000). In the Ridley Scott-helmed Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal (2001), he disappeared under layers of prostheses to play Hannibal Lecter’s former patient and nemesis, whom the cannibal induced into cutting off his own face after drugging him.

Though proficient at evoking the morally bankrupt, Oldman proved equally adept at summoning pathos. He assumed the mantle of the avuncular Sirius Black in several installments of the Harry Potter films, beginning with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and played a police lieutenant allied to the titular caped crusader in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (2005, 2008, 2012). His turn as the unassuming yet dangerous spy George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) earned Oldman his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 2012 he appeared as a gangster in Lawless, a Prohibition-era drama about bootlegging.

Oldman’s later credits include the thrillers Paranoia (2013) and Criminal (2016) as well as the action remakes RoboCop (2014) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). In 2017 he appeared in the action-comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard and then starred under heavy prosthetics as Winston Churchill in the drama Darkest Hour, set during the early years of World War II when the prime minister must rally Britain to carry on against encroaching German troops rather than pursue a peace treaty. For his performance in the latter film, Oldman won his first Academy Award as well as a Golden Globe Award. He then appeared as the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in the thriller Hunter Killer (2018) and as a cofounder of a law firm involved in dubious dealings in the farce The Laundromat (2019).

In David Fincher’s biopic Mank (2020), Oldman gave an Oscar-nominated performance as Herman Mankiewicz, a screenwriter working on the script for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). His credits from 2021 include Crisis, a drama about the opioid epidemic, and the thriller The Woman in the Window, in which a woman with agoraphobia believes she saw a crime. Oldman then starred in the TV series Slow Horses (2022– ), playing an ill-tempered spy overseeing a group of disgraced MI5 agents; the show, a comic thriller, was based on a book series by Mick Herron. Oldman was nominated for a Golden Globe (2024) for his work in the series. In 2023 he played U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman in Christopher Nolan’s historical epic Oppenheimer.