Australian actor Jack Thompson was just shy of 40 when he portrayed Maj. James Francis Thomas, defense attorney for three Australian soldiers charged with wartime atrocities during the Boer War, in Bruce Beresford‘s Breaker Morant (’80).
For this ringing performance, Thompson won the Best Actor award from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA) as well as a Best Supporting Actor trophy during the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
Thompson/Thomas: “The fact of the matter is that war changes men’s natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations. Situations in which the ebb and flow of everyday life have departed, and been replaced by a constant round of fear and anger, blood and death. Soldiers at war are not to be judged by civilian rules.”
