The movies Gary Oldman said saved his career: “There was a shift”
The best actors are never going to find themselves struggling for work, but there are always extenuating circumstances to take into account, something that hit Gary Oldman hard in the early 2000s due to a huge shift in the complexion of his personal life.
By that point, he was already known as one of the most chameleonic performers of his generation, not to mention one who was viewed as among the best in the business by his peers and contemporaries. Still, there was family to think about first and foremost, before a pair of projects came along that proved to be the ideal blessings at the perfect time.
There aren’t many people in the acting profession who won’t consistently point to Oldman as one of the finest performers in Hollywood. If you shrink that pool down to asking British professionals about their inspirations, almost all of them will bow down to the star. It’s an accolade of widespread acclaim that Oldman has gathered through a career on screen.
That might sound trivial. Of course, most film actors will be judged by such, but Oldman has seemingly played more variety, more levels and a wider range of intoxicating roles than any other. Whether it is his portrayal of Sid Vicious or Winston Churchill, his turn as a villain or a hero, his willingness to blow himself to epic proportions or whittle down into the shadows. Oldman has done it all, and then some.
Oldman had been working solidly since the 1980s, but his life away from the screen was often tumultuous. He’d been married and divorced three times between 1987 and 2001, which doesn’t include the two-year period he spent engaged to Isabella Rossellini. His second and third children were born in 1997 and 1999 when he was wed to Donya Fiorentino, with the Academy Award winner granted custody following their split.
However, it was far from a straightforward process, with Oldman cleared on a domestic abuse allegation levelled at him by Fiorentino during the divorce proceedings before she was ultimately granted limited and supervised access to the kids as long as she passed the required drug and alcohol tests. It was a testing time for the star, and he was understandably concerned about how the shifting state of cinema could affect the way he earned an income to provide.
“At 42 years old, I woke up divorced, and I had custody of the boys,” he told Drew Barrymore, which was inevitably going to affect the how, when, and where of his day job. “That, in itself, was hard because there was a shift in the industry where a lot of productions were being Hungary, Budapest, Prague, Australia, you know, all of these places. So, I turned down a lot of work.”
Fortunately for Oldman, two major roles in a pair of lucrative franchises came along right when he needed them, allowing him to have the best of both worlds. “Thank god for Harry Potter,” he admitted. “I tell you, the two – Batman and Harry Potter – really, they saved me because it meant that I could do the least amount of work for the most amount of money and then be home with the kids.”
Between 2004 and 2008, Oldman appeared in seven features, five of which revolved around either the boy wizard or Gotham City’s resident superhero, with Spanish thriller The Backwoods and German crime comedy Dead Fish the only outliers. Being recruited by Warner Bros for two of its marquee properties ensured that not only was Oldman largely remaining in the United Kingdom so as not to constantly uproot his children, but he was being well-compensated for his efforts, which was his number one concern.
