He is lanky, he is angular, with a forlorn beauty on the border of homeliness. He has played a juvenile delinquent, a Walter-Mittyesque layabout, a makeshift housewife, a father, a mother figure, a criminal, a naif, a maniac, a zealot, but never a total villain.
In such films as Billy Liar, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and The Dresser, Tom Courtenay is at once pedestrian and poetic. The trill of his voice can both grate and inspire.
Yet in such films as Doctor Zhivago and A Dandy in Aspic, he can be cold and threatening, with a challenging allure that inspires a deranged masochism in his most desperate admirerers. In all of his roles he is on the edge of something.
In any case, this lovely, lantern-jawed, high-pitched, eternally rain-shrouded Englishman is not one you can easily walk away from.
1962
Private Potter
1963
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Billy Liar
1964
King and Country
1965
Operation Crossbow
King Rat
Doctor Zhivago
1966
The Night of the Generals
1967
The Day the Fish Came Out
1968
A Dandy in Aspic
1969
Otley
1971
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Catch Me a Spy
1979
I Heard the Owl Call My Name
1983
The Dresser
1987
Happy New Year
Leonard Part 6
1990
The Last Butterfly
1991
Let Him Have It
1996
The Boy from Mercury
1998
A Rather English Marriage
1999
Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
