Churchill's Brian Cox says on-screen wife Miranda Richardson is ‘always right’

The actors appear in Jonathan Teplitzky’s film about the “great woman” behind the “great man”
Emma Powell12 June 2017
The Weekender

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Brian Cox has joked that he and his co-star Miranda Richardson had a similar relationship to their characters, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, on the set of their new movie.

The acclaimed actors appear in Jonathan Teplitzky’s film Churchill, about the “great woman” behind the “great man” in the days before the D-Day landings in June 1944.

Speaking about working with his on-screen wife, Cox, 71, said: “We hit it off straight away. If something isn’t right she doesn’t beat around the bush.

“She says ‘this is not right’ — and she’s always right.”

Fragility: Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson in Churchill
Lionsgate

Richardson, 59, said she was attracted to the role as it explored the Prime Minister’s fragility and his dependence on his wife. “The draw for me was not knowing very much about Clementine because she hid her light under a bushel,” she said.

“She was the great woman behind the great man — but her concern was to keep him good and to support him and to enable him to get the country through the war. Churchill couldn’t have done it without Clemmie.

“It was interesting to see the domestic, not the full frontal of the war so much, but the marriage and the minutia of that.”

Cox was so keen to show the “truth” in the marriage that he begged his co-star to slap him to highlight the strain they were under. “It sounds like I’m a masochist, but when I read the first script I visualised Miranda slapping me,” he said.

“When the final script came, they had cut [it]. So I told them ‘we’ve got to get the slap back!’ It took four or five takes. I was red.”

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Churchill is out on June 16.

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