Winston Churchill has been portrayed many times on screen, from John Lithgow in The Crown to Michael Gambon in TV film, Churchill’s Secret.
Back in 2017, there were two movies focused on the towering World War 2 Prime Minister, with Gary Oldman winning the Best Actor Oscar for Darkest Hour.
Released prior was Churchill, which starred Succession’s Brian Cox in a controversial take on the historical figure. This film is set in the weeks leading up to D-Day, as Churchill fights with fellow Allied Commanders and King George VI, expressing his doubts about Operation Overlord.
It’s not common knowledge that Churchill wasn’t fully behind D-Day, which celebrates its 81st anniversary today, as he was concerned about a similar slaughter to Gallipoli during the First World War.
Instead, he preferred the idea of invading Nazi-occupied Europe from its soft underbelly in Italy. Speaking exclusively with Daily Express around the release of the film, Cox revealed the evidence for Churchill’s doubts.
Cox told us previously: “It’s mentioned in [Supreme Allied Commander, later US President] Eisenhower’s diaries and in [Chief of the Imperial General Staff] Brooke’s diaries. If you’ve ever written a diary, you write judiciously, especially if you’re dealing with people who are still alive. So in a way, it’s a tip of the iceberg when Eisenhower talks about something, you know that something else is going on, that he doesn’t go into in great detail – and the same with Brooke, but it sort of corresponds. That’s why there’s this whole notion of his plan and counter-plan.”
Incredibly, the actor also revealed how Churchill’s plan had been put through computer analysis at Sandhurst, which concluded the War could have ended even earlier.
Cox added: “And in fact, what we discovered on our film from our military advisor [who was at Sandhurst in the 1980s]; Churchill’s plan had been put into computer analysis. He didn’t tell us about this until the last week [of filming]. I said, ‘So what was the result?’ He sort of ummed and ahhed, he said, ‘With a few caveats, the war might have ended six months earlier.’”
Churchill is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.