Brian Cox is getting all KINDS of praise for the TV show Succession, but he’s been acting in historical films and TV shows for decades! This Scot is a Shakespearean theater actor and has won a gazillion awards, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Let’s take a look at his very very long frock flick resume!
As always, some productions I can’t find images of Cox in:
- Hastings in Stage 2: “She Stoops to Conquer” (1971)
- William Wallace in Churchill’s People (1974-75)
- James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell in Bothwell (1979)
- Father Góra in Pope John Paul II (1984)
- Aethelwine in Royal Deceit (1994)
- Clayton Blackstone in Poodle Springs (1998)
- Glover Boyd in Citizen Gangster (2011)
- Reverend Andrew Clark in The Great War: The People’s Story (2014)
Josef Stalin in Thirty-Minute Theatre: “These Men Are Dangerous: Stalin” (1969)
A quick bio of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Trotsky in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)
The feature film about the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, who were overthrown and executed in the Russian Revolution. Trotsky was, of course, the revolutionary and politician who helped to lead that revolution.
Victor Hugo in Ego Hugo (1973)
A TV movie about the famed 19th-century French writer.
Henry Durie in The Master of Ballantrae (1975)
A TV series adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, about two brothers during the Scottish Jacobite Rising of 1745 led by Bonnie Prince Charlie. Cox plays one of the brothers.
Henry II in The Devil’s Crown (1978)
A BBC TV series that dramatized “the reigns of three medieval Kings of England: Henry II and his sons Richard I and John,” per Wikipedia.
Laurent LeClaire in Thérèse Raquin (1980)
A BBC TV adaptation of an 1867 Emile Zola novel, about an unhappily married woman who has an affair.
Leon Campbell in The House on the Hill (1981)
Per IMDB, “A series of six plays centered on a house in Glasgow, from 1878 to the 1980s.”
Burgundy in King Lear (1983)
A TV adaptation of the Shakespeare play.
Lord George Murray/Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun in Scotland’s Story (1984)
A TV series telling the history of Scotland; I think it’s a docudrama?
Johann Sebastian Bach in The Cantor of St Thomas’s (1984)
A TV movie about the 18th-century German composer.
Dr. McGregor in Florence Nightingale (1985)
A TV bio-series about the famous 19th-century nursing pioneer.
Jock Purves in Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun (1988)
A TV biopic about a famous Anglo-Kenyan female aviator.
Maj. Hogan in Sharpe (1993-2008)
Cox played a Royal Engineers officer in this long-running Napoleonic Wars TV series.
Angus McTeague in Iron Will (1994)
A feature film about the real-life 1917 dog-sled race from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Saint Paul, Minnesota. McTeague seems to be a baddy.
Killearn in Rob Roy (1995)
He plays a corrupt “factor” or estate manager in this feature film about the mid-18th-century Scottish rebel.
Argyle Wallace in Braveheart (1995)
13th-century Scottish rebel William Wallace’s (real? fictional?) uncle.
Judge Freisler in Witness Against Hitler (1996)
A TV movie about the real-life story of Helmuth Von Moltke, a German aristocrat who attempted to overthrow Hitler.
Lord Morton in Longitude (2000)
The story of John Harrison’s efforts to develop the marine chronometer and thereby win the Longitude prize in the 18th century. “James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton … was a Scottish peer and astronomer who was president of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh from its foundation in 1737 until his death in 1768,” per Wikipedia.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring in Nuremberg (2000)
A TV movie dramatizing the famous war crimes trials at the end of World War II. Cox gives a really strong performance as the bullish Göring.
Minister Breteuil in The Affair of the Necklace (2001)
A melodramatic take on the 1780s scandal in which Marie-Antoinette was blamed for allegedly buying an insanely expensive necklace, which she didn’t, told from the perspective of the woman who set up the scam. Breteuil is the main advisor to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in the film.
Agamemnon in Troy (2004)
A big budget feature film adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, which tells the story of the ancient world’s Trojan War.
Dr. Joseph Bell in The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle (2005)
A BBC TV film about the writing of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Bell was author Doyle’s mentor.
Jack Langrishe in Deadwood (2004-06)
A really highly reviewed HBO Western series. Langrishe was a real-life “Irish-American actor and impresario who travelled extensively throughout the American West and later in life became one of the first State Senators of Idaho” per Wikipedia.
Lewis Serrocold in Marple: “They Do It with Mirrors” (2009)
Obligatory Agatha Christie murder mystery sighting!
Captain Sharp in The Sinking of the Laconia (2010)
A TV miniseries about, you guessed it, the World War II sinking of the Laconia.
Baron William d’Aubigny in Ironclad (2011)
A film about the siege of Rochester Castle by King John in 1215. Wikipedia tells me his character was “an ennobled wool merchant who opposes King John’s tyranny.”
J. Edgar Hoover in The Curse of Edgar (2013)
A docudrama about the infamous CIA director.
James McCurdy in Forsaken (2015)
A “revisionist” Western (per Wikipedia).
General Mikhail Kutuzov in War & Peace (2016)
An adaptation of the Tolstoy novel set during the Napoleonic-Russian war from 1805-12.
Jared Talbot in Penny Dreadful (2014-16)
The fabulously costumed horror TV show that I’m making IMDB summarize for us: “Explorer Sir Malcolm Murray, American gunslinger Ethan Chandler, scientist Victor Frankenstein and medium Vanessa Ives unite to combat supernatural threats in Victorian London.” Talbot is the father of the gunslinger and appears in season 3.
Guadagni in Medici (2016-19)
A TV series about the powerful 15th-century banking family.
Winston Churchill in Churchill (2017)
A feature film about the British prime minister dealing with his concerns about the Normandy invasion.
Which is your favorite of Brian Cox’s many historical film and TV roles?
Too bad you couldn’t find pictures of Citizen Gangster. Cox plays the retired policeman father of the main character (and real person), Edwin Boyd, who in addition to being a bank robber and alleged murderer was also something of a Canadian folk hero. It’s a nice bit of niche Canadian history, and also features Kelly Reilly as Boyd’s wife.
What Kutuzov is wearing is what in British uniform-speak would be an ‘undress’ or ‘fatigue’ cap (i.e. for off-duty wear) specific to the Russian Army of the period; I don’t think any other European army had a peakless cap, and it wasn’t a naval style anywhere till at least a generation later.
In the 1812 campaign, Kutuzov is often depicted with that fatigue cap, as a marked contrast to the more formal bicorne that other Russian generals wore. So the cap is very authentic and specific to Kutuzov, who is a figure greatly revered in Russia as the man who defeated Napoleon.
I’ve seen pictures on Hanoverian troops wearing something similar into action circa Waterloo – my understanding is that this sort of ‘pork pie’ hat was fairly common as an alternative to the shako, being rather more comfortable but much less smart looking.
Brian Cox is so great, love him in everything I’ve seen him in. As a Doctor Who fan, I need to add his role as Sydney Newman in ‘An Adventure in Space and Time’! Love the HBC blanket coats in Iron Will :)
Hoover = FBI.
Truly, deeply amusing to see Mr Cox go from playing Stalin to playing Trotsky – given the history involved it’s rather a dark joke but still!
Also, it’s a crying shame nobody had the good sense and good taste to cast the man as a Bond villain – he’s played just about every other sort of cad, after all!
Damn, what range, literally: ranging all over many centuries. And what a good choice for Henry II. (O’Toole never convinced me.)
Langrishe in Deadwood. Watching Cox and McShane trading Shakespeare. The scripts are mannered, and knowing that he had two Shakespearian titans on his hand, the writer (David Milch) went to town. There are whole episodes in iambic pentameter. It was brutal, muddy, and really well done. And the costumes are great. Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock look like their photos.
As a lifelong Shakespeare fan I found the pseudo-Shakesperean dialogue absolutely excruciating. To me it was just more of the “English as it has never been spoken but sounds vaguely old-fashioned” writing that bedevils so many period TV shows and films.