Tom Wilkinson, OBE (born 12 December 1948) is a two-time Academy Award-nominated, and BAFTA-winning English actor.
Tom Wilkinson was a football quarterback for several teams in the Canadian Football League.
He was born in Iowa on January 4, 1943 but moved to Wyoming with his parents in 1945. Tom Wilkinson played high school football in the small town of Greybull, Wyoming. He is the second of three professional football players to come from this little town of 1700 in the Big Horn Basin. The others were Jim Crawford who played for the Boston Patriots of the American Football League and Brett Keisel who plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was scouted as both a football and baseball player out of high school.
Thomas "Tom" Wilkinson (born in Lincoln, England) is an English former footballer. He most recently played for Grays Athletic on loan from Lincoln City. In the summer of 2007 Lincoln were forced to release Wilkinson as a broken leg had sadly ended his career aged 21.
A popular British character actor, Tom Wilkinson was born on December 12, 1948, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England in a long line of urban farmers. Economic hardships had forced his family to move to Canada for a few years when Tom was a child. After he had returned to England, Tom attended and graduated from the University of Kent at Canterbury with a degree in English and American Literature. Tom first became active in film and television in the mid-1970s, specializing in playing men suffering from some sort of emotional repression and/or pretensions of societal grandeur. In 1989 his daughter Alice was born, and in 1992 his daughter Molly was born, both with actress-wife Diana Hardcastle. He first became familiar to an international audience in 1997 with his role as one of six unemployed workers who strip for cash in 'Peter Catteneo''s enormously successful and multiple Oscar-nominated comedy (including Best Picture) Full Monty, The (1997). That same year, he was featured in Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda (1997), and as the rabidly unpleasant father of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's young lover in Wilde (1997). Wilkinson was also shown to memorable effect as a theatre financier with acting aspirations in the multiple Oscar-winning (including Best Picture) Shakespeare in Love (1998); also in 1998, he acted in one of his few leading roles in Governess, The (1998), portraying a 19th century photographer with an eye for the film's title character (Minnie Driver). Over the next few years, Tom would become more popular, especially with American audiences, with such roles as General Cornwallis alongside Mel Gibson (I) in the blockbuster Patriot, The (2000) and as the grief-stricken father, Matt Fowler, in the critically acclaimed and multiple Oscar-nominated (including Best Picture) In the Bedroom (2001). One of those nominations was Best Actor in a Leading Role for Tom (his first Oscar nomination).
