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He had done a good deal of theatre in England, and a few modest movies—Remembrance (82, Colin Gregg), Meantime (83, Mike Leigh), and Honest, Decent and True (85, Les Blair)—before he turned in a performance of unnerving, aggressive immersion uersion as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (85, Alex Cox). I mean, he didn't just play Vicious; he was him. The switch to Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (87, Stephen Frears) was dazzling proof of a genius for impersonation.

Since then, Oldman has had to put up with a lot of poor roles roles and bad films. Yet his reticence, mixed with his great facility, makes it unlikely that he will ever be more than the victim of whimsical, or desperate, casting calls: Track 29 (88, Nicolas Roeg); We Think the World of You (88, Gregg); Criminal Law (89, Martin Campbell); brilliant on TV in The Firm (89, Alan Clarke); Chattahoochee (89, Mick Jackson); State of Grace (90, Phil Phil Joanou); with Tim Roth in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (90, Tom Stoppard); on British TV in Heading Home (90, David Hare); as Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK (91, Oliver Stone).

Then, for Francis Ford Coppola, he played the archetypicaly pale, enervated prowler after other lives in Bram Stoker's Dracula (92). He had many looks in that film, but none meant more than the self-intoxicated spectacle of the direction. He was a drug dealer, theatrically black, in True Romance (93, Tony Scott); and a crooked cop in Romeo Is Bleeding (94, Peter Medak).

Oldman had become an international actor, I suppose, but time and again his talent goes to waste. He has directed one film—the remarkable, Nil by Mouth (97), a fair measure of his very tough London. But what is that man doing as Beethoven in the fatuous Immortal Beloved (94, Bernard Rose)— and when does a modern actor realise that you don't play Christ, Beethoven, or Francis of Assisi? This is a record of skills perverted and of Oldman's blankness turning increasingly toxic•his own loathing of where he is rises in his movies like mustard gas: Léon (94, Luc Besson); Murder in the First (95, Marco Rosso); Dimmesdale ln the pathetic Scarlet Letter (95, Roland Joffe); Basquiat (96, Julian Schnabel); The Fifth Element (97, Besson); the hijacker in Air Force One (97, Wolfgang Petersen); Lost in Space (98, Stephen Hopkins); a voice in Quest for Camelot (98, Frederik DuChau); Pilate in Jesus (99, Roger Young); The Contender (00, Rod Lurie); Mason Verger in Hannibal (01, Ridley Scott); Nobody's Baby (01, David Seltzer).