For Timothy Spall, art imitates life yet again as he plays notorious Holocaust denier David Irving
The acclaimed British actor on the challenges of portraying real people and of respecting every character, in a career that’s included figures as diverse as Winston Churchill, hangman Albert Pierrepoint and Ulster politician Ian Paisley
Every actor, if their career spans a significant period of time, gets the chance to play a real person. But for Timothy Spall, it’s become something of a specialism.
The Brit won best actor in Cannes for embodying the grunting 18th-century artist J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner and lent able support to an Oscar-winning Colin Firth in The King’s Speech as former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – a figure he later voiced in the animated comedy Jackboots on Whitehall. Other roles include football legend Peter Taylor in The Damned United, British executioner Albert Pierrepoint in Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman and opera singer Richard Temple in Leigh’s Gilbert and Sullivan bio Topsy-Turvy.
Compared to playing fictional characters, “the responsibility is higher”, he admits, “because you’re portraying somebody who was alive and somebody who has loved ones, if they’re not, who are [maybe] still about. So I do feel a lot of responsibility.”
The film doesn’t explain David Irving’s psychology. It looks at the consequences of what he’s done.
None more so than in his latest film, Denial. The role – historian and author David Irving – is arguably one of the most controversial of Spall’s career. “He was a figure who elicited so much disdain,” says Spall, “because his opinions were upsetting to many people.” The British-born Irving’s 1977 text Hitler’s War argued that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. By the late 1980s, he was openly denying the Holocaust, specifically the killing of Jewish people in the Auschwitz gas chambers.