Churchill’s Secret dramatizes a little-remembered footnote to one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century.
Airing Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings), Churchill’s Secret offers a somewhat fictionalized version of a deadly serious real-life event: the debilitating stroke Winston Churchill suffered in the early summer of 1953 while serving as prime minister.
Astonishingly, those around him, including his rivals, managed to keep the seriousness of his condition a secret from the country for months, until he had recovered enough to resume his duties.
That part is all true, and Michael Gambon (The Singing Detective) does a first-rate job playing the grumpy and irascible Churchill as he regains arm movement, starts to walk, and learns to speak again.
As soon as he understands his situation, he realizes that some of his friends, including his right-hand man and likely successor Anthony Eden (Alex Jennings), see this as an opportunity to ease him out.
So he must avoid, finesse, and/or fool them.
He also must gently fend off his wife Clementine (Lindsay Duncan, below, left), who insists that,at the age of 78, he should see this as a path to retirement, not to more grueling political warfare.
She isn’t hesitant to play the guilt card, telling him that he’s put his family second most of his life and now he has a chance to put them first for the time that remains.
When his four children show up, however, it becomes clear that spending more time with them, even if he could, wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice.
With the exception of Mary (Daisy Lewis), they’re much more like people you might want to see occasionally for a weekend.
All of that seems more or less accurate.
The special added attraction, meaning it was totally made up, is the nurse who coaxes and occasionally bullies Churchill into pushing hard enough to come back.
She’s Millie Appleyard, played so endearingly by Romola Garai (left) that you wish she had existed. She’s a perfect counterbalance to Churchill, with a will as strong as his own.
And as long as they’ve created her, the producers also give her a story.
She’s got a long-running boyfriend who’s eager to get married and start a family, but she confides to Clementine she’s ambivalent about doing that. Truth is, she says, she’s worked long and hard at her own career, and she doesn’t want just to abandon it.
That sentiment, somewhat radical for 1953, foreshadows a thought millions of women would have in the years ahead. The “having it all” thing.
Exactly what Millie’s dilemma has to do with Churchill is less clear, since for obvious and logical reasons he’s not part of that conversation.
Still, whatever its relevance to the main thread of Churchill’s Secret, Garai plays it well.
In the end, Churchill’s Secret chronicles a minor if intriguing episode in the life of a man who will be best remembered for shepherding his country through World War II.
Thanks largely to Gambon, Garai, and Duncan, it’s a tale well told.