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Not the Prime Minister we deserved, but the Prime Minister we needed right then.note 

"We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm."
— Remark to Violet Bonham-Carternote 

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874 — 24 January 1965). Knight of the Garter, Order of Merit, Companion of Honour, Territorial Decoration, Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, Fellow of the Royal Society, Nobel Laureate, first Honorary Citizen in United States history, and almost the Duke of London. British Prime Minister from 1940-45 and again from 1951-55. Best known for helping win World War II; he even won a Nobel Prize for writing about it in a six-volume Doorstopper.

A Prime Minister very much beloved in Britain, he is famous for his constant wit (e.g. Bessie Braddock MP: "You, sir, are drunk!" Churchill: "And you are ugly. Tomorrow morning, madam, I shall be sober."), his cigar-smoking (his scowl in the famous portrait by Yousuf Karsh is because Karsh took his cigar away) and the Victory salute ("the bird" inverted, although he didn't invert it).

One of the all-time great English-language prose stylists. Many of Churchill's quotes are legendary (with his insults even more legendary; Cracked.com once described him as "handing out third-degree burns like some sort of reverse fireman"). He was so quotable that despite not being a fiction writernote , he managed to name two tropes: The End of the Beginning and A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma. A brief sampling:

However, he also had a dark side, frequently overlooked in British popular history. He supported eugenics (at one time suggesting 100,000 Britons should be sterilized), concentration camps in Kenya (with up to a million Kenyans detained), and massacres in Sudan and Afghanistan, and his bellicosity included ill-conceived plans to try to reconstitute the Wehrmacht and continue WWII to destroy the Soviet Union.note  In former British colonies, particularly those of the Indian subcontinent, Churchill is remembered in a negative light, in contrast to his positive reputation in Britain. He topped a BBC poll of history's 100 Greatest Britons, and is generally regarded as a great wartime leader - just not a particularly great Prime Minister.

He was also a notorious drunkard, smoker, and eccentric, having once ostensibly met FDR whilst buck-naked in the bathtub, declaring "You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide."


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     Published works of Winston Churchill 
  • The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898)
  • The River War (1899)
  • Man Overboard (1899)
  • Savrola (1899) - Churchill's only published fictional work.
  • London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900)
  • Ian Hamilton's March (1900)
  • Mr. Brodrick’s Army (1903)
  • Lord Randolph Churchill (1906)
  • For Free Trade (1906)
  • My African Journey (1908)
  • Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909)
  • The People’s Rights (1910)
  • The World Crisis (1923–1931)
  • If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg (1930)
  • My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)
  • India (1931)
  • Thoughts and Adventures (Amid These Storms) (1932)
  • Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933–1938)
  • Great Contemporaries (1937)
  • Arms and the Covenant or While England Slept: A Survey of World Affairs, 1932–1938 (1938)
  • Step by Step 1936–1939 (1939)
  • Addresses Delivered in the Year 1940 (1940)
  • Broadcast Addresses (1941)
  • Into Battle (Blood Sweat and Tears) (1941)
  • The Unrelenting Struggle (1942)
  • The End of the Beginning (1943)
  • Onwards to Victory (1944)
  • The Dawn of Liberation (1945)
  • Victory (1946)
  • Secret Sessions Speeches (1946)
  • War Speeches 1940–1945 (1946)
  • The Second World War (1948–1954)
  • The Sinews of Peace (1948)
  • Painting as a Pastime (1948)
  • Europe Unite (1950)
  • In the Balance (1951)
  • The War Speeches 1939–1945 (1952)
  • Stemming the Tide (1953)
  • A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–1958)
  • The Unwritten Alliance (1961)

     Churchill in life 

Churchill had been in the army before going into politics, and was also a war correspondent. He served in both The River War and the The Second Boer War, playing minor but conspicuous roles in each. In the former, he charged with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman; in the latter, he escaped from a Boer POW camp and traveled 300 miles to neutral Portuguese East Africa. He even served briefly in World War I after his resignation from the Cabinet. As well as his Nobel Prize-winning book on the Second World War (not the most reliable source, but an invaluable memoir), he wrote a history of the English-speaking peoples and a largely forgotten political thriller called Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania.

Churchill was originally elected as a Conservative in 1900, he changed to the Liberal Party due to his support for free trade. He soon became a cabinet minister and the architect of several of the reforms and welfare programs introduced by the Liberals, and was involved in many more.

"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year has passed."
—UK Home Secretary Winston Churchill, 1910 Memo to PM Herbert Henry Asquith

"I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race."
—UK Home Secretary Winston Churchill, 1910 Departmental Paper

These included the abortive eugenics initiative proposed above. Churchill managed to become First Lord of the Admiralty and masterminded the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915, resigning upon its failure. He lost his seat in 1922, and tried to set up his own party, the Constitutionalist Party, but three elections in two years ended up rendering it impractical to do so, and he instead rejoined the Conservatives following the 1924 election. (In his own words: "Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.") He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) for the next five years, where he made a disastrous decision to reintroduce the gold standard. Churchill described this as the biggest mistake of his career; it contributed to high unemployment and mass strikes. He was isolated within the party in the 1930s, in no small part due to being the one of the few politicians who publicly opposed forcing Edward VIII to abdicate over his impending marriage to Wallis Simpson,note  but made a political comeback after his opposition to the appeasement of Germany was vindicated.

Churchill took over as Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain resigned in 1940 after the Nazis invaded Norway, and invited the Labour Party to join his government. From the 21st of June 1940 to the 22nd of June 1941, the UK was the only country—apart, that is, from Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, and a host of Asian and African protectorates and puppet states, basically, the rest of The British Empire—fighting against Germany. A few members of his own cabinetnote  suggested not-so-discreetly that Churchill should just sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler, let the Nazis have their way with mainland Europe, and focus on building up the UK's defences enough to make invading the island an unappealing prospect.note  Churchill was unswayed, however, and with the support of Labour leader Clement Attlee and Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair, was able to persuade his party that they should continue the war. Churchill drafted, practiced, and performed some of his most famous speeches around this time with the aide of just two speechwriters and a handful of typists (and the advice of his colleagues). These are rightly considered brilliant works of oration, and are often credited with maintaining the entire Commonwealth's fighting spirit.

However, the historian Richard Toye noted in his book The Roar of the Lion that Churchill's speeches weren't always received by everyone at the time as being inspiring and brilliant. It depended very much on who the speech was aimed at, and who was listening, and what the occasion for the speech happened to be.

For example, the famous "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech, after the Dunkirk evacuation, was received far more warmly in the USA than it was in Britain, which reflects the fact that the speech was crafted to assure US listeners that Britain would not be seeking peace terms with Germany. Many of Churchill's colleagues considered it depressing, rather than stimulating. Conversely, Churchill's speech of July 4 1940, in which he reported the destruction of much of the French Fleet by the Royal Navy at Mers-el-Kébir, was received with much more enthusiasm at the time, even though nowadays it's hardly his most famous speech, because the mood of the House and the public had changed in the meantime and people felt encouraged by this concrete sign of Britain's willingness to fight on. In general, though, Churchill's speeches served to frame British intentions in 1940 and focus attention on why the country was at war; but it would be wrong to think that he single-handedly won the war with the sheer power of his oratory. As always with history, it's more complicated than that.

The situation improved after Operation Barbarossa and Germany's declaration of war upon the The United States that December. Churchill became a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, though his fondness for Roosevelt was undoubtedly much greater than Roosevelt's for Churchill, and he managed to work effectively with Josef Stalin despite his hatred for communism.

"Our reign, in India or anywhere else, has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it."
— Speech in the House of Commons, 8th July 1920

In 1942 Churchill finally acknowledged the long-term impossibility of holding India, after two years of attempting to undo promises to the effect that India would soon be given full political independence as a 'Dominion' (like Canada, Australia, etc). After the rejection of diplomacy with the Indian National Congress, British attempts to suppress the consequent rebellions and terrorist acts had been relatively successful and had been achieved at a minimal cost in British lives (thanks to the relative reliability of Indian police and troops). However, in the long-term India could not be held against the will of its millions-strong middle- and upper-classes. To his credit, Churchill was eventually persuaded that he had to acknowledge this reality - even though the maintenance and expansion of The British Empire was very dear to him.

By mid-1943, Churchill had correctly (in a pragmatic and self-interested sense) decided that acting to save Europe's Roma and Jews from destruction by the Axis powers was against Britain's national self-interest. Military historians maintain that this was the correct Realpolitik decision for Britain, though they do not argue about the moral price of non-intervention. Churchill astutely kept the paper-trail on this and all other similarly controversial matters to an absolute minimum by discussing them verbally in meetings with trusted associates. In early 1944 British efforts to prevent the destruction of the European Jews from becoming common knowledge among the British people began failing, whereupon Churchill astutely created a paper trail which implied that his attempts to save the Jews had been stymied by a callous RAF. In his memoirs he claimed that he had not known of The Holocaust until mid-1944, and claimed that the RAF had opposed his efforts to save the Jews because they said that they were physically incapable of disabling the Auschwitz-II/Birkenau facility.

"I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to British ideas on freedom. [...] A socialist state could not afford to suffer opposition - no socialist system can be established without a political police. [...] No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They [the Labour Party] would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo."
— Prime Minister Winston Churchill, election broadcast of 4th June 1945

''"There was a time when employers were free to work little children for sixteen hours a day. [...] For years every attempt to remedy these crying evils was blocked by the same plea of freedom for the individual. It was in fact freedom for the rich and slavery for the poor. Make no mistake, it has only been through the power of the State, given to it by Parliament, that the general public has been protected against the greed of ruthless profit-makers and property owners."
— Leader of the Labour Party Clement Attlee, election broadcast of 5th June 1945

Famously, his party were routed by the Labour Party on the 5th of July 1945 general election, just two months after victory in Europe. He appears to have campaigned on the basis of his own personal popularity, and was not seen to have adequately acknowledged the popular mood favouring state programmes to care for the crippled, wounded, ill, impoverished, under-educated, and elderly. While many voters considered him a fine wartime leader, they seem to have been sceptical about his ability to govern the country in peacetime (which mirrors the view historians have of him). More generally, the Conservative Party wasn't helped by voters still remembering Stanley Baldwin's dismissive attitude towards those affected by The Great Depression, along with what at the time were seen as Neville Chamberlain's failed appeasement policies. Churchill later recovered and won a second term in 1951note , serving until his retirement from frontline politics in 1955. (During this time, Elizabeth II became Queen.) note 

His second term as Prime Minister is generally regarded a lot less favourably than his first. Internationally, it was marked by appeasement of German nationalists and militarists, through cooperation with the Americans to further water down the already febrile 'justice' meted out against Axis War Criminals. In 1953, Churchill ordered (in his capacity as Acting Foreign Minister) the illegal release of Albert Kesselring and Erich von Manstein - who had neither been acquitted of their War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity nor served their sentences. In Australia, Churchill's second term is best known for Britain's successful development of nuclear fission bombs in 1952, as the testing in Western Australia induced cancer in an entire generation of Australian farmers (care for the survivors cost 400k AUD in the 2016 federal budget). Under his leadership, the British government also conducted its first studies into the likely effects of a nuclear attack upon their country, began their Cold-War policy of making no provision for the survival of the British population in the event of a nuclear exchange, and worked to prevent the dissemination of information about the effects of nuclear weapons. This was done because the non-provision of shelters and information was deemed necessary in order to save money and prevent mass-panic, demoralisation, and nuclear-disarmament sentiment.

Churchill died in 1965, three months after retiring from Parliament, and his state funeral became one of the most watched and attended funerals in history. He is buried in a churchyard in Bladon, Oxfordshire. Up until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005, his funeral was attended by the most heads of states.

Helping beat the Nazis, having a gift for words, and writing your own history will get a lot of people to forget your less popular policies — and some were very unpopular. Gallipoli and the gold standard are mentioned above. Although, to be fair, the failure of the Gallipoli/Dardanalles campaign was hardly his fault alone; he was just the delicious scapegoat for it. He made a number of blunders as First Lord of the Admiralty in the opening of World War One, largely due to his inexperience with issuing naval orders and his tendency to resort to unnecessarily colorful language, which confused their recipients. He was again isolated in the 1930s due to his opposition to Indian autonomy and the abdication of Edward VIII.

Furthermore, in 1943, while PM, he was at least partly responsible for the famine in Bengal, which eventually killed 4 million people. Though the direct causes of the famine could be said to lie with local British authorities in India rather than with him personally, his policies exacerbated the famine (such as draining too much resources from Bengal, and diverting emergency supplies away from Bengal), increasing the death toll by millions. He did not seem bothered by it, but responded by saying he hated Indians and expressed disappointment that Mahatma Gandhi had not died, having previously expressed disdain for Gandhi, suggesting he should be brutally executed for being a "seditious fakir". Critics of Churchill have argued that the Bengal famine was a "genocide" or "holocaust", and compared him to Hitler. Churchill was also responsible for atrocities in Kenya, where up to a million people were detained in concentration camps, many of whom were killed or tortured (including the grandfather of future US president, Barack Obama), as well as massacres he was involved in as a soldier in his younger years, during British invasions in Sudan and Afghanistan.

He was also notably racist, like many people at the time. He held white-supremacist views, including the idea of an Aryan master race (an idea he shared with his enemy, Adolf Hitler). He was also known for supporting eugenics, at one time even suggesting that 100,000 "degenerate Britons" should be forcibly sterilized or put in labour camps. Being a member of the aristocracy, he wasn't all that sympathetic to the concerns of the working class, including suggesting the Army be deployed to suppress labour strikes. He was also especially known for supporting the British Empire. Both have to be taken in the context of the time, however, with eugenics being wildly popular until Nazism showed the dark side of it, and that most Brits of the time were pro-Empire.

He also loudly denounced the Amritsar Massacre in India, a bolder move than expected since many British imperialists defended it.

He also never won the popular vote in a British general election: in the 1951 election, Labour actually polled a quarter of a million votes more than him, but the Conservatives won by 26 seats and Churchill took the victory.

He once had a meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt while he was taking a bath, had little awareness of social mannerisms and sometimes wandered around his house naked. He more or less had a drink with him at all times, thus the "You, sir, are drunk!" quote. He also suffered from depression, which he called his "black dog". He was also obsessed with what he called "the soft underbelly of Europe" in the Mediterranean, leading to results that varied from disastrous in World War One (Gallipoli/Dardanalles) to merely wasteful (the Italian campaign) in World War II. One little known aspect of this "soft underbelly" is the fact that after supporting ELAS (the Greek Partisans of the resistance against the Nazi Occupation of Greece, comprised of several communists), he immediately turned on them after liberation and tasked Lt. Ronald Scobie to arm and support Greek fascists and their collaborators to hunt down the partisans citing fears of a Communist takeover in the Mediterranean. He later justified it as part of a pre-emptive move during the Cold War but the Greeks saw it as an unjustified act of betrayal from people who had willingly allied with them against the Nazis.

Churchill was notably a child of a binational marriage; his mother Jeanette Jerome was an American socialite from Brooklyn. A study of her biography, and that of her father Leonard Jerome, makes it very clear which side of the family Sir Winston got his resilience from.

In 1963, he became the first person to be granted an honorary citizenship of the United States, and one of only two given this honor while they were alive (the other being Mother Teresa). Including Churchill, there are only seven honorary American citizens. He is also one of the very few non-American citizens to have a U.S. naval vessel named in his honour. (Appropriately, the USS Winston S. Churchill has a Royal Navy guest officer assigned to her company and flies the White Ensign below the Stars and Stripes.)

     Churchill in media 
Obviously, anything set in Britain during World War II is likely to at least allude to him.
Comic Books
  • He plays a major role as UK leader in the early part of Ãœber, before he is decapitated in Sieglinde's terror raid on London. His portrayal, in keeping with the Deconstructor Fleet nature of the work, is surprisingly even-handed compared to his idealised depiction in many UK and US WWII works, with such characteristics as drunkenly making tactical decisions, talking disparagingly about the British lower classes and battling depression to match his clear heroic leadership. In Invasion #14, Stephanie even alludes to the controversy over whether his wartime policies caused the 1943 Bengal famine.
  • He's a vacation buddy of Charles de Gaulle in De Gaulle at the Beach.

Fanfiction

Film

  • Makes a short appearance in Inglourious Basterds, during the planning of the Bastards' final attack. He's played by Rod Taylor.
  • In The King's Speech, about the abdication of Edward VIII and the ascension of George VI to the throne, Churchill was played by Timothy Spall. He appears to encourage Albert to take on the role of king, and also shares how he too once had a speech impediment. Spall also played Churchill in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games.
  • The Eagle Has Landed was a fictionalized account of a real Nazi plot to kidnap Churchill on his native soil. Ironically when Churchill is shown, he turns out to be an impersonator used as a decoy, making the entire mission All for Nothing.
  • Churchill: The Hollywood Years is a satire of Hollywood History where Winston Churchill is actually an American commando attempting to stop Hitler from marrying into The British Royal Family. The Churchill the world knows was just an actor called Ray Bubbles.
  • Young Winston, a 1972 biopic of his younger days directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Simon Ward as Churchill and Robert Shaw as Churchill's father Randolph, plus an All-Star Cast.
  • Played by Gary Oldman in Joe Wright's 2017 biopic of Churchill, Darkest Hour, which like most Churchill films focuses on the most celebrated period of his career, the summer of 1940.
  • In Churchill, another 2017 biopic of him, he's portrayed by Brian Cox. This focuses on a less celebrated period of Churchill's career, that being the year 1944, by which time control of the Allied effort in World War II had shifted largely to the Americans. The story is about Churchill's (true-to-life) fears that he's no longer relevant, including his doubts about the impending Allied invasion of Normandy, and his adjusting to a less prominent role: the filmmakers called it "a Coming of Age Story about a man in his seventies". This made it unpopular with those Churchill fans who prefer to focus on his glory years.
  • Cary Elwes portrays Churchill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which is loosely based on the creation of the Special Operations Executive.

Literature

  • In The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman, set during World War One, Churchill makes a brief appearance as a member of the War Cabinet.
  • Blunted Lance by Max Hennessey (in his Goff family trilogy) starts in The River War with Churchill present as a correspondent. It's noted he has a Commonality Connection with the protagonist due to his mixed English and American parentage.
  • The young war correspondent Churchill guest-stars in the Time Wars novel The Khyber Connection, and is attacked by time-travelling assassins.
  • In the Time Travel / Alternate History novel The Proteus Operation, people from a different United States go back in time to the 1930s to save the world from the Nazi Empire which defeated Britain. They need to find someone in politics to work with to save the UK. When the name Winston Churchill comes up they are about to dismiss him as all washed up and his career over. Then they think more about it and realize that he is untarnished with the defeatism and appeasement of so many others.
  • Frequently mentioned but rarely seen in the Timeline-191 Alternate History series by Harry Turtledove. When Britain allies with the Confederacy and loses the First World War, he becomes Prime Minister in a coalition with Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts on a platform of revanchism. He is forced to resign when London, Brighton and Norwich are destroyed by German atomic bombs and the British counterattack is defeated. Every time he is mentioned, characters reflect on his gift of the gab (EVERY TIME).
  • Yet another Time Travel novel, Lightning by Dean Koontz, ends with a time-traveling ex-Nazi returning to just after World War II and persuading Churchill to finish off the Soviets as well, creating a much nicer world.
  • Ken Follett's Doorstopper novel Fall of Giants features Churchill during World War One.
  • The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series imply that he was a son of the Big Three; Hades, Poseidon or Zeus. Its Wiki reveals that he is the son of Poseidon.
  • Jack L. Sawyer, one of the twin protagonists of Christopher Priest's The Separation, is assigned to Churchill as an aide-de-camp. He gradually comes to believe that this is a stand-in and not the real Winnie. (Doubles and imposture are a continuing theme in the novel.)
  • Eternity Road. When the protagonists are ready to give up their expedition, their leader accidentally activates a hologram called Winston in the remains of a historical theme park, who convinces her to keep going. They only find out who Winston is after discovering a library preserved Just Before the End.
  • In Terrance Dicks's Doctor Who novel Players, several time-travelling saboteurs, at various points of Churchill's life, try to prevent his role in the downfall of Nazism.
  • A recurring character in the Dr. Watson At War series by Robert Ryan, set during World War One. As befits the novels Reconstruction nature, Churchill is presented in an ambiguous manner—a brave and inspirational leader, but also a manipulative and ruthless politician.

Live-Action TV

  • When the cast of Are You Being Served? camps out on the floor one night, Mr Grainger does an impression of Churchill giving one of his famous speeches.
  • A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia has Churchill trying to convince Lawrence of Arabia that King Feisal can rule another kingdom in the Middle East instead of Syria (which the British have already promised to the French).
  • Appeared in "Victory of the Daleks", the third episode of the 2010 series of Doctor Who. He and the Doctor are apparently old friends, and he keeps trying to swipe the TARDIS key from the Doctor. He also turns up in the season finale "The Wedding of River Song" in an corrupted version of the universe where every time is happening at once, where he intrinsically trusts the Doctor due to feeling echoes of their friendship in the proper timeline. Interestingly, in the latter, he is not prime minister; he is Holy Roman Emperor.
  • On Parks and Recreation, after Leslie had to pull down her pants on TV to prove her innocence in sex scandal, she says this in a Confession Cam (it...actually captures the man rather well):
    "It's gotten a lot harder to work in government. You think Winston Churchill ever had to pull his pants down and show his butt? No. But would he have? Yes. Now could he have? Well, maybe not towards the end of his life. But he would have. Because he loved his job."
  • In Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle one sketch focused around the fact that Churchill was in fact a pig. A trained pig whose mouth was controlled by remote control and the V-peace-sign was purely because with a cloven hooves there weren't many other type of gestations available. This sketch was curated by a "historian" called Alan Moore.
  • A young Churchill comes to Toronto in Murdoch Mysteries to give a lecture on his time in the Sudan during the Mahdist War and becomes the chief suspect in his best friend's murder. It's not him, but a fanatical follower of the Mahdi who saw the friend take part in the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb.
  • He appears in his Secretary of State days in Peaky Blinders, where it's revealed that he's overseeing Campbell's investigation of the BSA robbery personally, as they both believe it's tied to the IRA. Campbell's terrified of him. Later, at the end of Series 2, it turns out that the Unionist paramilitaries Campbell had sent to "take care" of Tommy Shelby were actually Churchill's men, and were under orders to let Tommy go free. They weren't nice about it, though.
  • There is a duology of TV biopics made by The BBC and HBO, released in 2002 and 2009: The Gathering Storm (named for the first volume of his history of World War Two), and Into the Storm (2009) (named for one of his war-time speeches), the former talking about his "wilderness years" in political exile in the years before the Second War as the threat loomed on the horizon, and the later about his greatest moments in the war and through it. Churchill is portrayed by Albert Finney in the first film and Brendan Gleeson in the second. Like Darkest Hour, very much stories about his Glory Days (making them unlike the 2017 Churchill mentioned above.)
  • He's portrayed by Michael Gambon in the 2016 TV film Churchill's Secret. The titular secret is a serious stroke Churchill suffered during his second term as Prime Minister.
  • In the first season of the 2016 TV series The Crown, which depicts the early reign of Elizabeth II (which coincided with Churchill's second term as Prime Minister), Churchill is played by John Lithgow. It's an unusually critical portrayal, showing him as a doddering old man who's hopelessly out of touch with the changing world of the 1950s, though he does get a spotlight episode that's more sympathetic. There are also a couple of flashbacks to his Glory Days during the Second World War.
  • He was played by Richard Burton in the 1974 British/American Made-for-TV Movie The Gathering Storm, released in the UK as Walk with Destiny. The film is not fondly remembered, not least because Burton generally phoned in his performance: he greatly disliked Churchill and refused to allow his manly mop of hair to be cut so as to simulate Churchill's baldness.
  • He was voted the #1 "Greatest Briton" on One Hundred Greatest Britons.
  • The 1983 miniseries Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, starring Robert Hardy, covers the period between 1929 and 1939, when his political career stalled. Hardy became so associated with the role of Churchill that he went on to play him in four more dramas and one drama-documentary.
  • In the 2014 miniseries about the run-up to World War One, 37 Days, during which period he was First Lord of the Admiralty, he's played by Nicholas Asbury.

Music

Podcast

  • Was the focus of an early episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History in Thoughts on Churchill, as well as being mentioned and brought up often in his other episodes, such as his Supernova in the East and Blueprint for Armageddon series. His "Finest Hour" speech is also a part of the intro for the show.

Video Games

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Appears in Time Squad, in which the main characters must go back in time and stop him from being a nudist.
  • Appears during the Family Guy episode "Road to Germany". Turns out his wit is a little bit overblown by history.
    Stewie: And look, there's Winston Churchill! Maybe we'll get an up-close look at his legendary wit.
    British Woman: Oh, Winston. Drunk again, I see.
    Winston: Yeah, well, you're a fat bitch.
    Stewie: Hm. I guess history's just whittled it down to the gems.
  • In an episode of Animaniacs that shows the Warner siblings past exploits, he appears in a scene where the three protagonists show up at his meeting with FDR and Stalin, letting them playfully jump on his stomach. (And cinching the meeting.)
  • He is featured in an episode of Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, where he leads a group of kids in playing capture the flag by speaking up for himself, something he teaches Brad how to do.

"We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be."

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