Rewriting history....

25 Nov 2014

Rewriting history
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From Braveheart to The Imitation Game, the tradition of Hollywood playing 
fast and loose with historical fact is ancient

By Guy Walters

Actors are used to playing other people – and not just on stage. Today’s 
Hollywood celebrities seem to be UN ambassadors one minute, novelists the 
next, and politicians every other Thursday. But there’s one role they love 
to play most of all – historian.

Whenever actors are interviewed about their roles in historical films or 
plays, they start talking about “all the research” they have done, and how 
their performances will help people “understand the true story” much 
better than if it were presented in some dull old book or musty lecture 
theatre. The latest celebrity to strut the boards as a Regius Professor of 
Modern History is none other than Russell Crowe, who we will shortly see 
starring in The Water Diviner, a movie about a man who travels to Turkey 
after the Battle of Gallipoli to try to find his three missing 
sons...../snip/


....Of course, this phenomenon of the actor-turned-revisionist historian 
is nothing new. But much to the chagrin of historians, it isn’t going 
away.

Take the recent example of "The Imitation Game", starring Benedict 
Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park cryptanalyst and 
mathematician who is widely regarded as being instrumental in cracking the 
German Enigma machine, and perhaps shortening the war by years.

In interviews, Cumberbatch has made a great deal of noise about wanting to 
play the tragic figure of Turing, who was later prosecuted and chemically 
castrated for being gay, as faithfully as possible.

But ironically, the film is a load of junk history. The catalogue of 
offences against the truth is too long to list here, but the most 
egregious falsehood is the notion that Turing covered up the treachery of 
John Cairncross, the Soviet spy, on the grounds that Cairncross was about 
to out him.

In truth, the men never met. But most of the British public will now 
believe that Turing abetted treachery. So much for honouring the poor 
man’s memory...../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11251483/Russell-Crowe-in-The-Water-Diviner-Rewriting-history.html