James Hawes’s film splits Nicholas Winton between two actors, Johnny Flynn in 1938 and Anthony Hopkins in 1988, to tell how a London stockbroker organised trains for refugee children and then kept quiet about it for half a century.

One Life is a 2023 British biographical drama directed by James Hawes and starring Anthony Hopkins as Sir Nicholas Winton, the London stockbroker who in the months before the Second World War helped bring 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia to Britain. Johnny Flynn plays the younger Winton, with Helena Bonham Carter, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Alex Sharp and Jonathan Pryce in the supporting cast. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 2023, opened in British cinemas on 1 January 2024 and reached Prime Video in several markets in the summer of 2024.

Two timelines, one man

The screenplay, by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, moves between two periods. In late 1938, weeks after the Munich Agreement, the 29-year-old Winton travels to Prague and finds families who have fled Nazi Germany and Austria living in camps with little shelter or food. He meets Doreen Warriner, played by Romola Garai, who runs the Prague office of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, and decides to get as many of the children out as he can before the borders close.

Back in London, helped by his mother Babi, played by Helena Bonham Carter, he works through the bureaucratic obstacles, raises the money and looks for foster families willing to take the children in. Trevor Chadwick, played by Alex Sharp, is one of the volunteers who stay behind in Prague. The trains run until the last one, due to leave on 1 September 1939, is stopped by the outbreak of war.

The second timeline is set in 1988. Winton, now 79 and played by Anthony Hopkins, is clearing out his study at the request of his wife Grete, played by Lena Olin, and comes across the scrapbook that lists the children who were saved and the ones who were not. His old friend Martin Blake, played by Jonathan Pryce, is one of the few people who knows the story. The scrapbook ends up with the production team of the BBC consumer programme That’s Life!, presented by Esther Rantzen, who is played by Samantha Spiro, and the film builds towards the two broadcasts in which Winton, seated in the studio audience, discovers who is sitting around him.

The real Nicholas Winton

Winton was born Nicholas Wertheim in Hampstead on 19 May 1909, the son of German-Jewish parents who had settled in London and changed the family name. He worked in banks in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris before becoming a broker on the London Stock Exchange. Shortly before Christmas 1938 he was planning a skiing holiday in Switzerland when his friend Martin Blake, who was already doing relief work in Prague, asked him to come and help instead. Winton spent about three weeks in the city and left in January 1939, two months before the German occupation.

The rescue depended on a British rule approved after Kristallnacht that allowed refugees under 17 into the country if they had a home to go to and a guarantee of £50 per child. Winton advertised for families, placing the children’s photographs in Picture Post, and wrote to American politicians, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking them to take more; he later said that two thousand more children might have been saved if they had. Of the 250 children booked on the train that never left on 1 September 1939, only two survived the war.

Among the 669 who reached Britain were the future Labour politician Alf Dubs, the filmmaker Karel Reisz, the writer Vera Gissing and the Canadian broadcaster Joe Schlesinger. More than 370 of them were never traced. Winton himself always pointed to the people who did the work in Prague, Chadwick, Warriner and others, and he never set foot in the city’s main railway station, although a statue of him by Flor Kent has stood on its first platform since 2009.

Fifty years of silence and a television studio

The story stayed almost unknown until 1988, when the scrapbook passed to Elisabeth Maxwell, a Holocaust researcher played in the film by Marthe Keller, and from her to That’s Life! In February 1988 the programme invited Winton into the audience and introduced him to Vera Gissing, one of the children on his lists. In a follow-up broadcast, Rantzen asked anyone in the studio who owed their life to him to stand, and more than two dozen people around him rose. The British press started calling him the British Schindler, after Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Jewish workers and whose story Steven Spielberg had not yet filmed; Schindler’s List would follow in 1993.

Recognition came late and in large amounts. Winton was knighted in 2003, the Czech Republic gave him its highest honour, the Order of the White Lion, in 2014, and he died on 1 July 2015 at the age of 106, 76 years to the day after a train carrying 241 of his children left Prague. The film uses his life as its frame: its closing titles state that more than 6,000 people were alive in 2023 because of the rescue.

From a 2020 announcement to a first feature for James Hawes

One Life is based on If It‘s Not Impossible… The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, the 2014 biography written by his daughter Barbara Winton. The project was announced in September 2020 with Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn attached and Aisling Walsh as director. By September 2022 James Hawes had taken over, in what became his first feature film, and Helena Bonham Carter, Jonathan Pryce, Romola Garai and Alex Sharp had joined the cast. Barbara Winton had asked for Hopkins to play her father. Filming took place in London that September and in Prague, including scenes at the city’s main railway station.

Hawes came to the film from three decades in British television. He directed Christopher Eccleston in the Doctor Who episodes The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, two episodes of Black Mirror, Hated in the Nation and Smithereens, and six episodes of the first season of Slow Horses. He had worked with Bonham Carter before, on Enid, the BBC television film about the children’s author Enid Blyton, which earned him a BAFTA nomination as best director. After One Life he made The Amateur (2025), his second feature.

The film was produced by Iain Canning and Emile Sherman’s See-Saw Films, the company behind The King’s Speech, with BBC Film, MBK Productions, Cross City Films, FilmNation Entertainment and LipSync, and with Joanna Laurie and Guy Heeley as producers. Lucinda Coxon had previously adapted The Danish Girl, and Nick Drake is best known as a poet. The score is by the German composer Volker Bertelmann, Zac Nicholson was the director of photography and Lucia Zucchetti edited the film.

The cast and their own links to the story

Helena Bonham Carter had a family connection to the material: her maternal grandfather, the Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón, helped thousands of Jews escape during the Second World War and has been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce had worked together twice before, in a one-night stage reading of Under Milk Wood in 1992 and in The Two Popes in 2019. Johnny Flynn, a South African-born actor and musician, had played David Bowie in Stardust and Mr Knightley in Emma, both released in 2020. For the recreation of the 1988 broadcast, the studio audience was made up of descendants of the children Winton helped bring to Britain.

Release, box office and one dispute

After its Toronto premiere, the film had its European premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2023. Warner Bros. Pictures released it in the United Kingdom on New Year’s Day 2024, Vertical Entertainment in the Czech Republic in February and Bleecker Street in the United States on 15 March 2024. Its worldwide gross passed $50 million. In Berlin it received the Cinema for Peace award for the most valuable film of 2024.

The release also brought a small controversy in Britain. The BBC Film website first described the rescued children without saying that most of them were Jewish, and some cinemas repeated the wording in their listings. After protests, BBC Film changed the description to say that Winton had saved predominantly Jewish children. Within the family, the reception was warmer: Winton’s son praised Hopkins’s portrayal of his father.

Earlier screen versions of the Winton story

One Life is not the first film about Winton. The Slovak director Matej Mináč made three: the drama All My Loved Ones (1999), with Rupert Graves as Winton, the Emmy-winning documentary The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton (2002) and the documentary drama Nicky’s Family (2011). Those films were made while Winton was still alive and drew directly on the survivors. One Life is the first English-language feature about him built around an international cast, and the first to reach cinemas across Europe, North America and Australia.

What the film sets out to do

The structure tells you where the film’s interest lies. A story like this could have been told entirely in 1939, as a race against the calendar, but Hawes and his writers give as much space to the old man in 1988 as to the young one in Prague, which turns the film into a story about what Winton did afterwards with what he knew: the scrapbook in a drawer, the regret over the children on the last train, the decision about whether to make any of it public. Whether that balance works is something each viewer will judge, but it explains why the film needed an actor of Hopkins’s age and standing at its centre rather than a younger lead alone.

Tags: dramas, Prime Video, Steven Spielberg, History, Anthony Hopkins