He helped save Europe from Nazi enslavement and laid the groundwork
for the rise of modern computing and robotics, only to be arrested and
brought to personal ruin on account of being gay, at the time illegal in
his native Great Britain. While the world can’t undo the raw deal that
Turing was handed, one upcoming movie will at least give a belated
celebration of the ill-fated mathematician’s contributions to human
civilization. And it will give British actor Benedict Cumberbatch the starring role.
Fans of the Lord of the Rings saga will remember Cumberbatch from his double role as the Necromancer and Smaug in 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and this year’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He also played Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness and was Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Nonfiction is in his repertoire, too: He played Ford in 12 Years a Slave and Vincent Van Gogh in the 2010 TV movie Vincent Van Gogh: Painted with Words.
Cumberbatch returns to the historical nonfiction genre in this upcoming look into the life of Turing. The film, The Imitation Game, will debut in theaters in late 2014. It takes place during World War II, when Turing worked with British intelligence and successfully cracked the Enigma code that the German navy had been using as an internal communications medium.
Postwar, he continued his research into the computing field and made several landmark discoveries. These include development of the LU method for solving matrix equations, and the Turing test, which still guides robotics development.
Turing’s achievements didn’t spare him from contemporary prejudices against homosexuality, however. He was arrested and convicted in 1952 for being gay, which was a criminal offense in Great Britain until British lawmakers repealed anti-homosexuality statutes in 1967.
Turing’s prosecutors forced him to choose between imprisonment or chemical castration to suppress his sexual urges. He accepted the latter, and suffered long-term impotence and gynaecomastia—enlarged breast tissue—as side effects. These deleterious physical alterations, combined with the downturn in his career due to his conviction nullifying the security clearance that had enabled him to work with British intelligence, may have factored into his committing suicide two years later.
Queen Elizabeth II issued Turing a formal pardon just this Christmas Eve, when she signed a Parliament-approved resolution recognizing Turing’s life work and the injustice that he suffered. The official Twitter handle for The Imitation Game released a photo that day of Cumberbatch in dress rehearsal for the movie, captioned “in honor of today’s Royal Pardon.”
The film has no official release date yet. But the script has been rate “best unproduced script in Hollywood” by Black List, which read it in 2011.
Fans of the Lord of the Rings saga will remember Cumberbatch from his double role as the Necromancer and Smaug in 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and this year’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He also played Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness and was Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Nonfiction is in his repertoire, too: He played Ford in 12 Years a Slave and Vincent Van Gogh in the 2010 TV movie Vincent Van Gogh: Painted with Words.
Cumberbatch returns to the historical nonfiction genre in this upcoming look into the life of Turing. The film, The Imitation Game, will debut in theaters in late 2014. It takes place during World War II, when Turing worked with British intelligence and successfully cracked the Enigma code that the German navy had been using as an internal communications medium.
Postwar, he continued his research into the computing field and made several landmark discoveries. These include development of the LU method for solving matrix equations, and the Turing test, which still guides robotics development.
Turing’s achievements didn’t spare him from contemporary prejudices against homosexuality, however. He was arrested and convicted in 1952 for being gay, which was a criminal offense in Great Britain until British lawmakers repealed anti-homosexuality statutes in 1967.
Turing’s prosecutors forced him to choose between imprisonment or chemical castration to suppress his sexual urges. He accepted the latter, and suffered long-term impotence and gynaecomastia—enlarged breast tissue—as side effects. These deleterious physical alterations, combined with the downturn in his career due to his conviction nullifying the security clearance that had enabled him to work with British intelligence, may have factored into his committing suicide two years later.
Queen Elizabeth II issued Turing a formal pardon just this Christmas Eve, when she signed a Parliament-approved resolution recognizing Turing’s life work and the injustice that he suffered. The official Twitter handle for The Imitation Game released a photo that day of Cumberbatch in dress rehearsal for the movie, captioned “in honor of today’s Royal Pardon.”
The film has no official release date yet. But the script has been rate “best unproduced script in Hollywood” by Black List, which read it in 2011.
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