A popular British character actor, Tom Wilkinson was born on December 12, 1948, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England in a long line of urban farmers. Economic hardships had forced his family to move to Canada for a few years when Tom was a child. After he had returned to England, Tom attended and graduated from the University of Kent at Canterbury with a degree in English and American Literature. Tom first became active in film and television in the mid-1970s, specializing in playing men suffering from some so - www.imdb.com

Throughout his illustrious acting career, which included an Oscar-nominated performance for "In the Bedroom" (2001) which put him on the Hollywood map, Tom Wilkinson enjoyed wide prominence without having to suffer from the burden of being a household name. True to his working class roots, Wilkinson remained relatively low-key and distinctly non-Hollywood, despite having starred in some of the new millennium's most significant films. He made his breakthrough the previous decade, however, start - movies.yahoo.com

A popular British character actor, Tom Wilkinson specializes in playing men suffering from some sort of emotional repression and/or pretensions of societal grandeur. Active in film and television since the mid-'70s, Wilkinson became familiar to an international audience in 1997 with his role as of one of six unemployed workers who strip for cash in Peter Cattaneo's enormously successful comedy The Full Monty. That same year, he was featured in Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda, and as the rabidly unple - movies.msn.com