LAMB Acting School 101: The Inspirational Gary Oldman

I was originally going to write up a Favored Five performances for the latest Acting School subject, the enigmatic and chameleonic Gary Oldman, but I found it to be either too easy or too boring, depending on how you look at - namely, that I'm relatively certain that most people's list of his performances would look largely like everyone else's.

So then, considering that the man is mostly unrecognizable from one film to the next - his greatest asset, if you ask me - I was going to just do a look back at "the many faces of Gary Oldman" or something like that. But as I was back over at the LAMB looking at something or other, I noticed that Rachel had already done essentially that, compiling eight of his more famous faces for the picture promoting this event in the featured content widget. I had to think of something new.

However, I'd been doing some image searches for him prior to that realization, and something later struck me - for an actor of his level of fame, the man certainly has a lot of artwork made in his honor. Now, I imagine that some of them were commissioned as part of a feature magazine or newspaper story on him, but they surely all weren't. I'd expect there to be many painted representations of actors like Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp, but they've been global megastars for decades now, while Oldman has always tempered his fame, voluntarily or not, rising well above that of 'character actor' but rarely into 'leading man' territory. I'm not even sure who could possibly be comparable to him; the first name that comes to mind is his Rosencrantz co-star Tim Roth, but that doesn't seem quite right, either.

Anyway, here are nine pretty awesome works of Oldman-inspired art...as well as one pretty awful one. I'll let you try and figure out which is the awful one. All works are copyrights of their respective artists.