Oldman is a child of the British working class. His father was an alcoholic who left the family early.
After a difficult start to his career - he worked as a shoe seller and in a slaughterhouse to finance his acting studies - Oldman established himself as a theater actor and was a member of the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company for a year from 1985.
Oldman became a star as punk legend Sid Vicious (1957-1979) in the cult biopic "Sid & Nancy" (1986) directed by Alex Cox (68). According to the actor, he almost didn't accept the iconic role - but it offered a small foretaste of the following decade, when Oldman seemed to be typecast as a psychotic villain in major film productions.
The villains he often played, Oldman once told the New York Times, would "burn from the first bar, they're like rock 'n' roll."
After moving to the United States in the early 1990s, Oldman appeared in a series of successful film projects such as "State of Grace" (German title: "Im Vorhof der Hölle", 1990), "JFK: Tatort Dallas" (1991), "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992), and "True Romance" (1993).
Oldman's most well-known roles from the nineties are probably those of the drug-addicted DEA agent Norman Stansfield in Luc Besson's (63) classic film "Léon - Der Profi" (1994) and the villain Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in Besson's brilliant sci-fi "The Fifth Element" (1997). Especially the embodiment of the last two mentioned villains seemed to be downright thieving fun for the actor, who is also known for his overacting.
