Cinema Blend
Actor of The Month
June 2004
Cinema Blend's Actor of the Month is bestowed to an actor or actress for their contribution to flicks these days. The actor/actress will be voted upon by the Cinema Blend staff, and will be featured in the Ring of the site logo at some point during the month (or not). That being Said, the “coveted” Cinema Blend Actor of the Month Award for June is Gary Oldman.
Bio taken from a random Leonard Maltin Movie Book sited on imdb.
Sid Vicious. Lee Harvey Oswald. Dracula. There's no one this young British actor can't play convincingly. After making a shattering impression on the British stage, he galvanized film audiences as doomed, frantic punk rocker Sid Vicious in 1986's
Sid and Nancy It was a performance so harrowingly good that it didn't seem to be a performance at all, but reality itself. (His earlier credits include Mike Leigh's 1983 telefilm “Meantime”) The auburn-haired, pockmarked Oldman then transformed himself into the far more articulate but equally tormented gay British playwright Joe Orton in
Prick Up Your Ears. After an enigmatic turn in Nicolas Roeg's inaccessible
Track 29, Oldman played an American lawyer in 1989's
Criminal Law (losing his British accent completely), an institutionalized Korean War vet in the little-seen
Chattahoochee and the easily addled Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard's
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
After an intense performance in the crime drama
State of Grace and an appearance in
Heading Home, Oldman went on to play Lee Harvey Oswald in the mosaic of flashbacks in Oliver Stone's controversial
JFK, which was likely seen by more American moviegoers than all his other films combined! How do you follow a part like that? By assuming the title role in Francis Ford Coppola's highly eroticized version of
Bram Stoker's Dracula, of course, decked out in elaborate period costumes, smothered in heavy makeup, and sporting a thick, almost impenetrable accent. Since then he's appeared in
True Romance (1993, with a mane of dreadlocks, as a Chicago drug dealer),
Romeo Is Bleeding,
The Professional,
Immortal Beloved (all 1994, in the last named as Beethoven),
Murder in the First and
The Scarlet Letter (both 1995, in the latter as Arthur Dimmesdale). He was married to actress Uma Thurman.
Catch Gary this month in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Show your love for all things Oldman.
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