Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins stars in the biographical drama One Life, as British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, a former stockbroker, who helped to save 669 children from the Nazis in the months leading up to World War II and the Holocaust. Photos: Supplied.
“If it’s not impossible, there must be a way to do it,” were immortal words spoken by British stockbroker and humanitarian Sir Nicholas ‘’Nicky’’ Winton in 1938 that changed one aspect in the course of history.
He visited Czechoslovakia in 1938, just weeks after the Munich Agreement was signed, and encountered families in Prague who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria. He helped compile a list of children needing rescue and worked to fulfil the legal requirements to bring the children to Britain and find homes and sponsors for them. This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for ”children’s transport”).
As a 29-year-old, Nicky cancelled a ski holiday and instead spent nine months masterminding a seemingly impossible plan to rescue hundreds of Jewish children and find them homes in the UK. More than 6000 people are alive today because of his efforts.
The winner of two Academy Awards, Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs, The Father, Remains of the Day) gives a sterling performance as the pivotal character in One Life, based on the true story of Sir Nicholas, who helped to arrange the escape of 669 children from Czechoslovakia in 1939.
The film is adapted from If It’s Not Impossible … The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, a 2014 biography of Winton written by his daughter Barbara Winton. Hopkins initially turned down the role, but gladly accepted when the opportunity came back in 2021.
“It sounds weird to say that this story was personal to me because obviously I wasn’t involved in the Holocaust, but I do remember the war,” Hopkins, 86, recalls. “I remember the bomb damage. That period of history encompasses my own life. It’s part of my consciousness.”
One Life shifts between two timelines. The 2023 biographical drama is from British television director James Hawes (Enid, The Amateur.) The film alternates between following Hopkins as a 79-year-old Winton reminiscing on his past, and actor-musician Johnny Flynn (Lovesick, Stardust) as a 29-year-old Winton attempting to help groups of Jewish children in German-occupied Czechoslovakia to hide and flee in 1938-39, just before the beginning of World War II.
As the younger Winton, he accompanies a friend to pre-war Prague in 1938 and discovers that thousands of people are living in refugee camps in Czechoslovakia after fleeing Nazi persecution. Although Winton was at the time working as a stockbroker, he joined forces with the British Committee for Refugees, based in Prague, and devised a plan to move children across Europe by train to England.
“It’s hard for us on this side of the Holocaust to imagine that, in 1938, people didn’t know what these events were pushing toward,” Flynn says. “It was an existential threat, certainly for people back home in Britain. But Nicholas, who had Jewish heritage, connected to the plight of these people. Because of the type of person he was, he went there and saw it and he came back to England going, ‘No, these people are starving and dying’.”
Johnny Flynn plays the role of the young Nicholas Winton in One Life.
In supporting roles are Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech, The Wings of the Dove) as Babi Winton, Nicholas’s British, German-born mother who actively assists in his humanitarian efforts; Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Enemies, A Love Story) as Grete Winton, the elderly Winton’s wife; Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes, The Age of Innocence) as Martin Blake, another Kindertransport humanitarian who remains friends with an elderly Winton; Romola Garai (The Hour, Becoming Elizabeth) as Doreen Warriner, an English Kindertransport benefactor helping on site in Czechoslovakia; and Alex Sharp (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) as Trevor Chadwick, a British Kindertransport altruist who accompanied some of the children during their escapes by train.
Hopkins impeccably captures Nicky’s quiet, hands-on, persistent determination to rescue lives and the trauma he experienced at the lives he wasn’t able to save – including the children on the ninth train. It was eloquently accurate.
Winton’s philanthropic accomplishments remained unknown and unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years, until 1988, when he was invited to the BBC television program That’s Life!, where he was reunited with dozens of the children he had helped come to Britain and was introduced to many of their children and grandchildren.
Winton died in 2015, aged 106. His life story is a clarion call to choose action over apathy in the face of injustice.
One Life, directed by James Hawes, is streaming on AppleTV+
