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James Mottram

Even before the Oscars were given out earlier this week,   victory already belonged to the subject of  The Imitation Game. Dubbed the "father of the modern computer", Alan Turing is famed for breaking German naval codes and his work on the Nazis' Enigma cipher machine during the second world war.
But it's taken decades for the late British mathematician to gain wide public recognition for his work.
"His importance is massive compared to how people know him," says Benedict Cumberbatch, who delivers a tour de force as Turing.

Part of the reason for this is the fact that all work carried out at Bletchley Park, the British government's code-breaking centre, was kept secret long after the war ended, with participants signing the Official Secrets Act.

Yet this was not the only reason for Turing's lack of recognition. Secretly gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, Turing was arrested in 1952 for having sex with a 19-year-old Manchester man, and charged with "gross indecency" under anti-homosexuality legislation. Faced with imprisonment or a "chemical castration" hormone treatment, he chose the latter; two years later, he was found dead at his home from cyanide poisoning. He was just 41.
"His ideas were so free in many ways," says Morten Tyldum, the film's Norwegian-born director whose Oscar nomination is one of eight that the film received. "That was what captured me. I wanted to make a movie that celebrates the outsider, the one who is different, the one who is not normal - and show how important that is."

So far, audiences and industry insiders alike appear to agree. A critical success with an 89 per cent "fresh" rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, the US$14 million budget production was the highest-grossing independent film of 2014. The film, which went on general release in Britain in November, has already grossed more than US$139 million around the globe.
Adapted from Andrew Hodges' biography  Alan Turing: The Enigma, Tyldum's film takes its name from a phrase used in Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Developing what became known as the "Turing Test" - to see whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human being - these early forays into artificial intelligence saw him dismiss the question, "Can machines think?" Instead, he pondered if there are computers capable "in the imitation game".

It was this that intrigued the film's screenwriter Graham Moore, who points out that Turing was as much a philosopher as he was a brilliant mathematician. "When you read his paper on 'The Imitation Game', the basic concept is: we are only what we can convince other people that we are," he says. "To get a statement like that coming from a closeted gay man in the 1930s and '40s is remarkable. Morten and I were both really passionate about this, how his personal life informed his scientific work. Being a social outsider, it gave him this perspective on the world that no one else could have had."
Yet to die the way he did, alone and in virtual obscurity, leaves a sour taste. It wasn't until December 2013 that Turing received a posthumous royal pardon in Britain, after an online petition and a private member's bill in the House of Lords. "He was grossly underserved and disgracefully punished by his own government that he helped win the war for," says Cumberbatch, who has since joined a campaign to pursue a similar pardon for the other British men persecuted for homosexual acts under this law.

As the actor wrote in a recent letter to The Hollywood Reporter, "Alan Turing was not only prosecuted, but quite arguably persuaded to end his own life by a society who called him a criminal for simply seeking out love … Sixty years later, that same government claimed to 'forgive' him by pardoning him. I find this deplorable, because Turing's actions did not warrant forgiveness - theirs did - and the 49,000 other prosecuted men deserve the same."
While Turing's life might seem like a prime candidate for a biopic treatment, Moore's script sat on the so-called black list in Hollywood for years - a series of revered but unproduced screenplays in circulation. "Hollywood was a bit afraid of the script," says the writer. "It's such a delicate story and a tricky story. It was such an English story, and it was important to us to make an English film."

When the funding finally came together, through independent sources, Tyldum had little problem recruiting an illustrious roster of collaborators, from Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, who plays Turing's Bletchley colleague Joan Clarke, to celebrated composer Alexandre Desplat and editor William Goldenberg, who had just picked up an Oscar for cutting Ben Affleck's  Argo. "It became this family, who all wanted to do this," says Tyldum. "Everybody felt privileged and honoured. We wanted to do justice to this man."
For Cumberbatch, it meant creating a character without the aid of audio or video recordings. To find his voice, he worked with dialect coach Sarah Shepherd, who had helped him perfect WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's Australian accent for  The Fifth Estate. With Turing also an Olympic-level marathon runner, Cumberbatch had to get in shape "just to try and be his build and know what that is, to have that in your body".

Tyldum says it was "a beautiful experience" to watch Cumberbatch transform. "He took it so seriously to portray Alan correctly," he says. "He insisted on having similar teeth to Turing, so we spent all this time finding still shots, and we remade his teeth."
Despite all the success The Imitation Game has enjoyed, it's been criticised in some quarters for not showing Turing's gay relationships. Andrew Hodges, the biographer whose book has been adapted, was rather upset that much screen time had been given to Turing's relationship with Clarke.
"He didn't have any [homosexual] relationships when he was at Bletchley Park," says Knightley, who is also up for an Oscar for her work. "If you were focusing on his Cambridge days, you would absolutely focus, I would imagine, on some of the sexual relationships that he had."

Cumberbatch also feels it was unnecessary for their film. "He lived his sexual life in secret and that's what the film explores. It's a secret. He couldn't be gay … it was illegal," he says. "This is a film about secrets and having to cover things up. He had to cover that aspect of his life up."
Also reviewed: another powerful war drama, Angelina Jolie's Unbroken
Yet it's secret no more. At the Academy Awards ceremony, Turing's name was heard by millions of viewers worldwide. Tyldum is "thrilled" by an awards season run that's also seen the film scoop several Golden Globe and Bafta nominations. "It gives the movie a lot of attention and hopefully more people will see it and more people will learn about Alan Turing," he says, with a smile. "He deserves that."
The Imitation Game is in cinemas now


Benedict Cumberbatch on Alan Turing's legacy and the challenge it presented for The Imitation Game crew

 "[Alan Turing's] importance is massive compared to how people know him," says Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays the code-breaking scientist in The Imitation Game. 

The film offers glimpses of Turing's early and later life.

Cumberbatch with Keira Knightley, who plays colleague and confidante Joan Clarke.

Cumberbatch has been nominated for best actor at all the major film awards for his role.

Codebreakers like Joan Clarke, played in the film by Keira Knightley, kept the secrets of their work until long after the war was over.

"Filming at Bletchley Park was amazing," actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said. 

A statue of Turing with an Enigma machine at Bletchley Park, north of London, where he and his fellow codebreakers were based. Photo: Gary Jones

Cumberbatch on location with director Morten Tyldum. 

The Imitation Game focuses on Turing's efforts to break German ciphers during the second world war.

Bletchley Park: now you can decode the enigma of country-estate cipher school

The mansion’s façade. Photos: GCHQ; Gary Jones; AP

The Cipher Office in Bletchley Park’s Block E, during the second world war.

An identity card film prop bearing a photograph of Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Alan Turing in the movie The Imitation Game, is displayed at the Bletchley Park museum.

An Enigma machine at Bletchley.

A decoding room in the restored Hut 6.

The Tirpitz Enigma.

Japanese vocabulary notebooks previously owned by Lieutenant D.J. Jones, who worked at Bletchley.

UK finally pardons computer pioneer, second world war codebreaker Alan Turing

Portrait of Alan Turing from archive of papers relating to the development of computing at the National Physical Laboratory between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Photo: Science Museum/NPL Archive

Bronze statue of Alan Turing, mathematician and pioneer of computer science. On campus of University of Surrey, Guildford, England. Photo: Shutterstock

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The British actor delivers a nuanced turn as the riddle-solving father of computer science with a brilliant mind and a tortured soul


The British actor delivers a nuanced turn as the riddle-solving father of computer science with a brilliant mind and a tortured soul.
