LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Tom Wilkinson: Full Monty
built 606 days ago
The son of a Leeds farmer, and brought up in Canada, Tom Wilkinson spent his early adulthood as a true travelling player, learning his trade with all the great British theatre troupes. Yet it wasn't until he was in his forties that film success arrived, when hits like The Full Monty and Rush Hour led to The Patriot, Ride With The Devil and In the Bedroom, for which he was Oscar-nominated. It was just reward - he been doing excellent work for decades, as the list below reveals.
Source:
Born Dec. 12, 1948, in Leeds, England, Tom Wilkinson worked as a character actor in television and film throughout the 1980s and '90s in movies such as In the Name of the Father (1993) and Sense and Sensibility (1995). He went largely unnoticed until hitting it, er, big in 1997's The Full Monty.
Source:
After an excellent turn as the nefarious Marquess of Queensberry in the biopic "Wilde" (1997), Wilkinson had a rare romantic lead in the period drama "The Governess" (1998), for which he actually went the full monty. He played a 19th century inventor who starts an affair with his home’s caretaker (Minnie Driver) only to later steal her ideas for photography. Continuing to make a name for himself, Wilkinson delivered a fine comic turn as a moneylender-turned-theater producer in the Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love" (1998). After reuniting with Ang Lee for a small role in "Ride With the Devil" (1999), Wilkinson was the model of restraint as General Cornwallis in "The Patriot" (2000), a Revolutionary War epic about a peace-loving patriot (Mel Gibson) who seeks revenge against the British for murdering his son. Meanwhile, he returned to the London stage for his first major role in more than a decade starring opposite Julia Ormond in David Hare’s "My Zinc Bed,†a look at love, loss and addiction through the eyes of a young, but idealistic alcoholic.
Source:
A popular British character actor, Tom Wilkinson specializes in playing men suffering from some sort of emotional repression and/or pretensions of societal grandeur. Active in film and television since the mid-'70s, Wilkinson became familiar to an international audience in 1997 with his role as of one of six unemployed workers who strip for cash in Peter Cattaneo's enormously successful comedy The Full Monty.
Source:
Last time he was at a Hollywood awards ceremony, with The Full Monty, Tom Wilkinson got a little over-excited. Now he's tipped for an Oscar, will he behave himself? By Emma Brockes
Source:
Wilkinson's run of bad luck could not continue. 2005 would see him back in full view in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's thrillingly gloomy take on the harsh genesis of the Caped Crusader. Tom would here play Carmine Falcone, wise-cracking boss of a Gotham crime syndicate, who has Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne beaten up and later attempts to muscle in on the Scarecrow's efforts to smuggle a fear toxin into Gotham. Sprayed with the very poison he hopes to control, Falcone loudly loses his mind and is consigned to the infamous Arkham Asylum. The same year would ... bring another interesting project, The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, a horror film set mostly in a court-room. This would be based on the real-life tragedy of Annaliese Michel, a German student who, in the mid-1970s, was thought to be possessed by demons.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Full Monty