In the 1997 box office hit The Full Monty, beloved British actor Tom Wilkinson is memorably seen smiling and wafting his shirt and jacket around his head as a redundant steel mill foreman turned male stripper.

That performance as Gerald Cooper would earn Wilkinson – whose death at age 75 was announced on Saturday – a Bafta as best supporting actor in the 1997 comedy hit and an opportunity to reprise Cooper in the 2023 Disney+ series, The Full Monty.

But poignantly, it was also a role as a Sheffield steel worker who loses his job that truly chimed with the Yorkshire-born actor, having lived through poverty, unemployment and depression himself.

Born Geoffrey Wilkinson in 1948 – he later took his father’s name when he discovered, on joining Equity, that there was another actor of the same name – he spent his earliest years in Yorkshire where his father ran a small farm. 

The two-time Oscar-nominated actor was the youngest of three sons. He was only five when a recession in the farming industry prompted his father to move the family to Canada to try to buy a farm of his own, but not having enough money, he ended up working at an aluminium factory. 

Tom Wilkinson’s performance as Gerald Cooper in 1997 hit The Full Monty would earn him a Bafta as best supporting actor and an opportunity to reprise the role in the 2023 Disney+ series

Poignantly, his role as a Sheffield steel worker who loses his job chimed with Tom Wilkinson, having lived through poverty, unemployment and depression himself

The Full Monty star Tom Wilkinson has died at age 75, his family announced on Saturday

Tom Wilkinson with his actress wife, Diana Hardcastle, pictured in 2005, with whom he had two daughters, Ansiedad Alice and Mollie

When the market for aluminium began to falter at the end of the 1950s, the family returned to Britain and Tom’s father started work managing a pub on the edge of Darmoor and working part-time as a farmer.