Gary Oldman: The Protean Man

Gary Oldman kicked in the door with his breakthrough role in 1983’s Meantime by Mike Leigh, radiating genuine menace as the impulsive no-hoper East End skinhead Coxy and, over the years that followed, the London native—having firmly established himself as an Angry Young Man nonpareil in Leigh’s film and Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy—emerged as a chameleonic performer of astonishing versatility and resourcefulness. From convincingly playing an Irish American gangster in State of Grace, alternately desiccant and smolderingly seductive in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to taking home an Academy Award for Best Actor for his turn as Sir Winston Churchill in 2017’s Darkest Hour, Oldman has by now lived dozens of very different lives on-screen, a motley menagerie unified by the absolute commitment of the man playing them.