Cinema's most versatile actor turns 60: Gary Oldman's 20 most memorable roles

Fitting that Gary Oldman's first real big break came in a biopic (you know, because he jus won an Oscar for one). The British actor's performance in 1986's "Sid and Nancy"  – he played Sid Vicious, the bassist for the legendary punk band, The Sex Pistols – is a huge reason why this movie has become a cult classic.

Gary Oldman's run of character work continued in 1990's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead", a dramedy based on the Tom Stoppard play of the same name (Stoppard also directed the film). The film is a retelling of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from the perspective of the minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which is to say that the movie is about two dudes who spend their life in the background. Oldman played Rosencrantz.

Although Gary Oldman has played a wide array of characters, he does have a penchant for certain types of roles. Like historical figures, for example. Oldman once again portrayed a real person in Oliver Stone's pseudo-biopic "JFK" (Stone took a lot of liberties with history in this movie), playing Kennedy killer Lee Harvey Oswald.

Talk about a character! Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (he made "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now") chose Gary Oldman to play Count Dracula in his 1992 adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel.

There are many reasons to love 1993 "True Romance"  – Quentin Tarantino wrote it, Tony Scott directed it, Brad Pitt played a stoner in in it, the Dennis Hopper-Christopher Walken face-off, take your pick. Personally, few things are better than Oldman as Drexl Spivey, the drug dealing pimp who thinks he's black.

Oldman extended his villain phase in 1994's "Léon: The Professional" by playing Norman Stanfield, a corrupt DEA agent with a knack for bursts of insanity who runs a drug operation in New York City. To say that Oldman killed it in this role would be an understatement. For many, Norman Stanfield is one of the greatest villains of all time.

Luc Besson must have fallen in love with Gary Oldman's villain work during "Léon: The Professional" because the director once again cast the actor as the bad guy in "The Fifth Element." In this sci-fi modern classic, Oldman plays Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, a villain intent on killing "the fifth element," a cloned humanoid woman named Leeloo that can trigger an ancient, powerful weapon.

In 2004, Potterheads were introduced to Gary Oldman's Sirius Black, the titular detainee in "Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban." The role was one of the actor's several forays into the world of blockbusters, but if he did it for the paycheck, audiences couldn't tell the difference.

When Christopher Nolan gave the Batman franchise a much-needed reboot, cleansing our collective palate after the abomination that was Joel Schumacher's "Batman & Robin," he cast Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon. Oldman was great throughout Nolan's trilogy, but he really stood out in 2008's "The Dark Knight," where he gave depth to a conflicted police officer looking the other way as a billionaire vigilante tries to rescue his crime-ridden city from a anarchic psycho-clown.

Okay, so Gary Oldman plays the villain a lot. To his credit, though, he's always great in those roles, and he portrays all kinds of different villains. Take Egor Korshunov in "Air Force One," a terrorist leader aligned with a recently deposed Kazakhstani dictator who manages to sneak in a crew inside Air Force One. Oldman is the perfect foil to Harrison Ford's President James Marshall.

Oldman isn't always the villain. Sometimes, he's the victim. That certainly was the case in 2001's "Hannibal," the sequel to "The Silence of the Lambs." Oldman brings life to Mason Verger, a character originally found in the book that seeks revenge against Hannibal Lecter for disfiguring him. Without spoiling anything, things don't end well for Mason Verger. And for once, it's not Hannibal Lecter who ends up feasting on a human.

Though he doesn't venture into the genre often, Gary Oldman can also do comedy, as evidenced by 2005 comedy "Dead Fish." The movie has Oldman play Lynch, a joyless hitman who accidentally ends up switching his phone with a beautiful woman named Mimi. The movie wasn't a big hit but it deserves a viewing.

Gary Oldman's long, illustrious resume includes "A Christmas Carol," a 2009 Disney CGI retelling of the Charles Dickens holiday staple. And as a testament to his versatility, he voices three major characters – Bob Cratchit, Marley, and Tiny Tim.

In this 2015 film adaptation of the Tom Rob Smith historical novel, Gary Oldman plays General Mikhail Nesterov, a military officer who ends up helping in the investigation of a serial killer targeting children. Fun fact: this movie was banned in Russian theaters.

In this 2011 adaptation of the popular John Le Carré spy thriller of the same name, Oldman plays George Smiley, a high-ranking British intelligence officer brought back out of retirement in order to investigate a mole inside his organization. The movie is a standout, a high-minded spy thriller that earned the actor his first ever Best Actor nomination from the Academy. 

2017's "The Space Between Us" is kind of like the sci-fi version of "The Stars In Your Eyes." In it, Gary Oldman plays Nathaniel Shepherd, the CEO of a company that's the first to colonize Mars (too late, Elon Musk!). He's also – Spoiler Alert! – revealed to be the father of the first ever child to be born on the Red Planet.

If you think about it, "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is a lot like "Darkest Hour" insofar as both films feature Gary Oldman as a leader debating whether to go to war or not. In the latter, he plays Dreyfus, who's in charge of a community of humans living dangerously close to the apes.

Throughout his career, Gary Oldman has proven his versatility by appearing in several different movies. Box office bombs are no exception. In 2013's "Paranoia", Oldman plays a manipulative and obsessed inventor/entrepreneur intent on bringing down his old mentor, played by Harrison Ford. The movie had a lot working against it, but it deserves at least some credit for once again pitting Oldman against Ford.

In 2012's "Lawless," Gary Oldman plays Floyd Banner, a somewhat benevolent mobster who ends up aligning himself with and assisting the Bondurant brothers in their bootlegging war. The movie script was written by the incomparable Nick Cave, and is an an adaptation of the 2008 historical novel, "The Wettest County in the World."

After nearly four decades, Gary Oldman finally got his Oscar for Best Actor this year thanks to his performance in "Darkest Hour," a Winston Churchill biopic that focuses on the early days of the European theatre of World War II. Oldman was so committed to getting Churchill's look right, he was able to persuade famed make-up artist Kazuhiro Tsuji to come out of retirement to help transform the actor into the prime minister's famously jowled face.