What a sad loss – Tom Wilkinson was quietly and consistently wonderful

For British movie audiences of a certain generation, there is one image of Tom Wilkinson that will always sum up his hold on our hearts: a paunchy, respectable bloke in a dole queue, wearing an anorak over his collar and tie, with a bunch of other depressed but much younger and scruffier males, shyly, almost unconsciously, practising some swaying erotic dance moves to the accompaniment of Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff.

He played the upright, uptight Gerald in the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty, an ex-supervisor at a Sheffield steel mill who got laid off like the blue-collar workers under him but, unlike them, he initially tries concealing his humiliating unemployment from his wife. But Gerald swallows his pride and joins the bizarre male striptease troupe of blokes whose manhood was once deeply bound up with their role as breadwinners, and who are now symbolically reduced to earning a few pounds revealing this same reduced manhood at the climax of a horribly unsexy dance routine. It was a gloriously tender, funny, sweet-natured and lovable performance from Wilkinson: he was the authority figure, the teacher/boss/dad character who had to get off his high horse and admit that he was as lonely and unhappy and need of help as everyone else. It was a part that Wilkinson instinctively knew how to play by showing the vulnerability within the grumpiness.

Wilkinson in Shakespeare in Love. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

Wilkinson had in fact been a much-cherished performer in British cinema before The Full Monty. In 1995 he played the expiring Mr Dashwood in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and, earlier, the tetchy solicitor Frank Braithwaite in David Hare’s underrated 1984 classic Wetherby. But it was The Full Monty which caught the eye of every casting director either side of the Atlantic and made him the Rolls-Royce of British screen character players: an actor so versatile, so confident, so intelligent and yet so discreet – and with such a convincing American accent – that there was genuine stardom in everything he did. He was able to tinge what might in other hands be an identikit middle-aged-man role with irony or comedy or tragedy.

In a comparable spirit to The Full Monty, though in a more cartoony comic role, he was the preposterous and stagestruck moneylender Fennyman in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love in 1998, who is prevailed upon to forgive debts in exchange for getting a small part in Shakespeare’s new play Romeo and Juliet. In 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michael Gondry, he was the white-coated Dr Mierzwiak, the chief executive of a firm which specialises in erasing painful emotional memories from people’s minds – and Wilkinson casually delivered the film’s most quoted line after Jim Carrey’s lovelorn Joel has nervously asked if the operation could cause brain damage. “Technically speaking,” says Wilkinson with casual suavity, “this procedure is brain damage.” And in a sinister way that could now be said to prefigure the world of abuse and #MeToo, Dr Mierzwiak has erased from the consciousness of Kirsten Dunst’s unhappy character Mary the memory of their sexual liaison.

Wilkinson perhaps came into his own in utterly serious, small roles (and these were many) whose banal ordinariness and stolid familiarity he could endow with something weighty and serious. In Tony Gilroy’s corporate thriller Michael Clayton from 2007 (with George Clooney as the brooding, shady fixer of the title) Wilkinson was the high-flying lawyer Arthur Edens; but this is not a role of suit-wearing monotony and his character has a serious psychotic episode. Perhaps only Wilkinson had the gravitas and the classically trained grandiloquence to sell this part and particularly the opening speech, manically jabbering at Clayton what is effectively the film’s id, its tortured soul, its intuition of something sinister within corporate culture.

Wilkinson in Michael Clayton. Photograph: Myles Aronowitz/Warner Bros/Allstar

Wilkinson was also an overwhelmingly menacing and predatory Pieter Van Ruijven, the wealthy patron of the artist Vermeer in Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in 2003; a rich man who thinks he has a right to everything, including the beautiful young woman in Vermeer’s employ, Griet, played by Scarlett Johansson, making chilling advances as she is humbly dealing with the laundry. A superb scene for them both.

But Wilkinson’s masterpiece – and there are so many to choose from – was probably Todd Field’s In the Bedroom in 2001, playing the paterfamilias under unbearable strain. He is a prosperous and respectable doctor in New England married to a woman played by Sissy Spacek, whose own excellence perfectly matches his. When their grownup son, played by Nick Stahl, who has a brilliant Ivy League academic career ahead of him, gets involved in a terrible situation with an older married woman who lives nearby, it is Wilkinson’s caringly protective father figure who has to take charge and begins to crack under the pressure of flouting the law and his own secret involvements.

It is a very American story and yet with something high-European in its emphasis on the inner dynamic of family psychology: you could almost imagine Bergman being interested in the project. It was Wilkinson, almost visibly vibrating like a pressure cooker about to blow, that gives the film so much of its emotional force.

Wilkinson has long been the gold standard of acting technique on the cinema screen, all the more valuable for his unshowy reticence. For as long I’ve been writing about movies, his presence on any cast list has been enough to make you sit up and pay that little bit more attention, because you knew that he was going to bring to that film a touch of class, of wit, of style, of pathos, and and often a very English decency. His complexity and intelligence were unmatched.