Gary Oldman

Committed and fearless, Gary Oldman has revealed an acting range over the course of his decades-spanning career that few performers could even come close to matching. Oldman's potential was clear from even his earliest roles, most notably his turn as a volatile London skinhead in Mike Leigh's 1984 made-for-TV drama, Meantime. Two years later, he had his breakthrough role, portraying wasted punk Sid Vicious in the gritty biopic Sid & Nancy. By the early '90s, Oldman was incredibly in demand, both in his native England and Hollywood, with Francis Ford Coppola casting him as the dark, charismatic lead in his big-budget adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. During much of the decade, Oldman gleefully took on villainous parts, including the demented, dreadlocked Drexl Spivey who briefly turns up in True Romance and Stansfield, the sadistic and corrupt DEA agent in the tense thriller The Professional. His willingness to participate in projects of widely varying quality hindered his career somewhat, but Oldman later turned things around by shifting gears and playing protagonists, first as the misunderstood Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series and then as the straight-shooting cop Jim Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman films. Often out to challenge himself, Oldman directed his first feature, the bleak drama Nil by Mouth, in 1997, but has since focused more on creating characters rather than movies, particularly garnering accolades for taking up the mantle of intelligence agent George Smiley in the 2011 big-screen version of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy.