![Sir Anthony Hopkins as Nicholas Winton](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/10/12/TELEMMGLPICT000343758199_16971225688600_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqDBDshJwigawdHG3IUeX8AaZhfwERHQFLYm5O1s5LDMk.jpeg?imwidth=680)
One Life: Anthony Hopkins is stirring as the ‘British Schindler’ who saved 600 Jewish children
Hopkins's light-touch and affecting restraint are perfect for this extraordinary true story of Hampstead-born stockbroker Nicholas Winton
![Sir Anthony Hopkins as Nicholas Winton](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2023/10/12/TELEMMGLPICT000343758199_16971225688600_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqDBDshJwigawdHG3IUeX8AaZhfwERHQFLYm5O1s5LDMk.jpeg?imwidth=680)
“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire,” runs the famous line in the Talmud – which found its way to millions of new ears around the world when it was quoted by Ben Kingsley in the closing scenes of Schindler’s List. This handsome and soberly stirring period piece centres on another saver of souls in wartime Europe: Nicholas Winton, a Hampstead-born stockbroker who travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1938 from where he helped spirit more than 600 children, most of them Jewish, to British foster homes, all while Hitler’s army pressed against their country’s borders.
Winton’s long-unsung work became national news in 1988 when his story was told on the BBC magazine show That’s Life! – and this readymade cathartic moment is cannily deployed as the natural climax of this retelling of his heroic deeds. He is played as an older man by Anthony Hopkins, with light-touch wit and affecting restraint, and as a younger one by Johnny Flynn, who adds some real period-drama dash while beautifully mirroring Hopkins’s demeanour and diction in his flashback scenes.
After seeing the desperate situation for himself when summoned to Prague by his friend Martin Blake (Alex Sharp), the young Nicholas simply clicks into action – forming a children’s wing of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, and enlisting his brusque German-Jewish mother (Helena Bonham-Carter, in blustery now-see-here-young-man mode) to pester the Home Office into processing the necessary documents at speed.
The core creative team – director James Hawes, of Black Mirror and Slow Horses, and screenwriters Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake – clearly know they’re on to a good thing with this raw material, and their adaptation smacks of a hands-off approach. No especially artful connections are cooked up between the past and present timelines, while Nicholas himself isn’t given much in the way of conventional backstory. He’s simply a noble, self-effacing person, which limits the number of notes Hopkins and Flynn have to play throughout.
There is perhaps a whiff of stolen valour, too, about the re-staging of the critical That’s Life! segment. Early on, the film has a good guffaw at the show’s artless tackiness – Hopkins, TV dinner on lap, grasps for the remote in dismay – but later essentially follows it step for step in order to wring from the audience the emotional response the moment demands. (The theatre actress Samantha Spiro makes a fine, non-imitative Esther Rantzen.) Yet even so, the scene is no cheap shot, but rings with a profound and understated power that quietly underlines the moral call to arms put up by its subject’s own life.
![tmg.video.placeholder.alt 6ethollg-PI](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6ethollg-PI/mqdefault.jpg)
In a pivotal scene, the younger Nicholas explains to his colleagues that he has faith in ordinary people because, well, an ordinary person is all that he is. One Life’s wholehearted embrace of that sentiment is the root of its limitations – and its potency too.
Cert tbc, 110 min. In cinemas from New Year’s Day