Tom Wilkinson obituary

A prolific actor and reluctant star, Tom Wilkinson, who has died aged 75, possessed many of the qualities of a favourite raincoat: he was unflashy, steadfast and could usually be relied upon when conditions were unfavourable.

The director Richard Eyre noted his “moral authority” and a tendency to bring “a sense of gravity and detail and intelligence.” Wilkinson said: “I see myself as a utility player, the one who can do everything. I’ve always felt that actors should have a degree of anonymity about them.” For that reason, celebrity was not his kettle of fish. “I can see it in other actors who love being famous. Me, I don’t care for it at all.”

What he had instead was an ability to inhabit characters without fanfare or folderol. In more than 100 film and television appearances, he played men who were often emotionally wounded – as in his first Oscar-nominated performance, as a grieving father who turns to revenge in the psychological drama In the Bedroom (2001). Occasionally, they were even depleted to the point of derangement, as in the case of the principled litigator he played in Michael Clayton (2007), who suffers a breakdown and strips naked during a deposition. That earned Wilkinson his second Oscar nod.

“Luck is number one,” he said. “There’s no point being a good actor in bad stuff. The crucial moment for an actor is to be good in a hit. Then it works.”

That moment came with his Bafta-winning turn as Gerald Cooper, an ex-foreman at a Sheffield steel mill who conceals his unemployment from his wife in the comedy-drama The Full Monty (1997). An international hit, the film arrived more than two decades into Wilkinson’s career and made him a household face, if not name.

The avuncular Gerald was the oldest of the film’s five downtrodden friends, who become amateur strippers to bolster their self-esteem as well as their wallets. Rarely did the actor’s height (he was 6ft 1in) serve him as well as it did here: as a man who has vanished comprehensively from his own life, he looks embarrassed to still find himself taking up quite so much space. Wilkinson, who reprised the role in the film’s 2023 television spin-off, showed Gerald to be weary and wind-beaten yet still sparkling with curiosity.

These were qualities apparent in many of his roles, such as the priest conducting a tender affair with his housekeeper (Cathy Tyson) in Antonia Bird’s Priest (1994), written by Jimmy McGovern, or the gay former judge retiring to Jaipur to search for his long-lost sweetheart before expiring peacefully in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).

Not that he was all twinkle. A Hollywood career for any middle-aged British actor invariably involves an embarrassment of wretches, and Wilkinson played more than his share.

He was a dastardly financier of the Uganda-Mombasa railway, almost as fearsome as the man-eating lions menacing Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer, in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996); a Hong Kong crime lord in the Jackie Chan action comedy Rush Hour (1998); Lord Cornwallis in The Patriot (2000), a drama about the American war of independence starring Mel Gibson; a mob boss in cahoots with monstrous villains, including the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster reboot Batman Begins (2005); and a venal railroad tycoon in The Lone Ranger (2013), a comic western with Johnny Depp.

His sketches in villainy were not confined to Hollywood. Wilkinson made a compellingly bitter Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas (Jude Law), in Wilde (1997), opposite Stephen Fry in the title role. This made it doubly fascinating when he showed up later in The Happy Prince (2018) as the priest who administers the last rites to Oscar Wilde. Rupert Everett, who played the lead as well as writing and directing the film, claimed that the dark echo in this casting choice was inadvertent. The effect for audiences, though, was rather as if Wilde were being tended to in his final hours by both God and the devil simultaneously.

Wilkinson was born into a farming family in Leeds. His mother, Marjorie, and father, Thomas, named him Geoffrey; he later promoted his middle name when he began acting professionally and found that Equity already had a Geoffrey Wilkinson on its books.

He spent the early years of his life in Kitimat in British Columbia, Canada, where the family relocated in search of a new life after selling their farm. When his father’s job in aluminium smelting did not work out, they moved back to the UK, settling in Cornwall where his parents ran a pub and Wilkinson attended Tavistock comprehensive school. Following his father’s death when Wilkinson was 16, his mother moved them back to Yorkshire.

His education continued at King James grammar school, Knaresborough, where his teacher Molly Sawdon inculcated in him a love of theatre. He directed the school’s production of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna. “I knew how to do it,” he said in 1994. “I knew when people should make their entrances. How they should act. As soon as I did this play there was no question about what I was going to do. Everything else just fell away.”

He studied English and American literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he was president of the drama society, before being accepted at Rada in London. He then won a place among the ensemble at the Nottingham Playhouse after auditioning with Hamlet’s speech to the players. “It was the best audition I had ever seen,” recalled Eyre. “It was startlingly real and authoritative.”

His work there included the 1975 world premiere of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians, also starring Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Rea and Jimmy Jewel. He later spent a frustrating two years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was disastrous,” he said. “It almost finished me off as an actor … I didn’t get the roles I felt I deserved.”

A busy stage and television career ensued. At the Royal Court in London in 1984, he played TS Eliot in Tom and Viv, and starred as Helen Mirren’s put-upon lover in the first series of Prime Suspect (1991). Among his occasional film work was David Hare’s Wetherby (1985) and the medical thriller Paper Mask (1990).

It was while earning £250 a week as King Lear at the Royal Court in 1993 that he decided he wanted more. “I was broke, and in a position I’d never been in before – phoning people up to ask: ‘Have you got anything for me, anything?’” Seeing friends and contemporaries doing films, he said, made him think: “I want to sit down with the big boys.”

“He’s ambitious,” said his agent Lou Coulson, “but it’s not an ambition for fame. He wants to be in line for good scripts.” When he came across one, Wilkinson described it as “an act of recognition, one of, ‘I can do this – in fact, I can do this better than anyone in the world.’”

One such occasion was the BBC adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit (1994), in which he was magnificent as the verbose, hypocritical Seth Pecksniff. “I knew almost immediately how to do it. The key turned the lock on the first go. Everything [Pecksniff] does is self-conscious. It is done for effect. When he’s alone, he doesn’t exist.”

His film work included parts in numerous Oscar-winners: Sense and Sensibility (1995), adapted by Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee, who later cast him in the US civil war epic Ride with the Devil (1999); Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which he was a money-lender humbled by the prospect of a stage role; and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), where his understated performance as a surgeon eliminating painful memories from the brain of a lovelorn patient (Jim Carrey) left audiences ill-prepared for the emotional wallop from revelations in the doctor’s own past.

More recent movies include Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Ava DuVernay’s civil rights drama Selma (both 2014), where he was cast as President Lyndon B Johnson, and Oliver Stone’s factually-based Snowden (2016), in which he played the Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill.

Related: What a sad loss – Tom Wilkinson was quietly and consistently wonderful | Peter Bradshaw

On television, Wilkinson was nominated for a Golden Globe for Normal (2003), in which he played a transgender factory worker, and won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for his supporting turn as Benjamin Franklin in the miniseries John Adams (2008).

In 2011, he starred in another miniseries, The Kennedys, as Joseph Kennedy. His wife, the actor Diana Hardcastle, played Kennedy’s wife, Rose. They had first met in 1986 while making the 10-part Jeffrey Archer adaptation First Among Equals (Wilkinson’s verdict: “Not very good”) and married two years later.

He is survived by her and their daughters, Alice and Molly.

• Tom Wilkinson (Geoffrey Thomas Wilkinson), actor, born 5 February 1948; died 30 December 2023