AUSTRALIAN writer-director Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man) directs Brian Cox as one of Britain’s most prominent and complexicons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at a nail-bitingly crucial stage of the Second World War.

Churchill is being shown at Bridport Electric Palace on Saturday July 22 at 7.30pm as a fundraiser for Bridport Hat Festival, which is being held from September 1 to 3.

Bottles of champagne will be given out at the screening to the man and woman wearing the best 1940s hat.

Anyone turning up without a hat will be asked for a fundraising donation of £2.

There will also be a fundraising raffle and fun quizzes.

Written by author and historian Alex von Tunzelmann, Churchill tells the story of the 48 hours before the D-Day landings in 1944.

Allied Forces are on the brink of action, with a massive army secretly assembled on Britain’s south coast poised to re-take Nazi-occupied Europe – all waiting for Churchill’s potentially triumphant (or totally disastrous) okay.

Drawing heavily on Churchill’s relationship with his beloved wife Clementine (Miranda Richardson), and with an excellent wider supporting cast including John Slattery (as President Eisenhower), James Purefoy (as King George VI) and Ella Purnell (as Churchill’s secretary), this immersive biopic reveals the terrifying anxieties, both personal and political, at the heart of a fascinating man and historical moment.

Churchill was MP for Cox’s home town of Dundee from 1908 to 1922 and was not popular with the actor’s family.

In an interview with The Scotsman newspaper, playing the part of Churchill, all of it filmed in Scotland, has seen Cox reassess his appraisal of both the man and the politician and discover a new-found respect.

“What got me about him was he was complicated. He was an astonishing human being: a soldier, poet, painter, strategist, politician,” he says. “He wasn’t universally liked, but he was a maverick and stood up for what he believed in so he had this ability to reach his moment finally, at the age of 65, becoming prime minister and doing this extraordinary job. But that all came at some cost, and he was amazingly human.“At the time of the D-Day Landings, he had had pneumonia, probably a heart attack, and he’s coming up for 70. He was frail, drank a ridiculous amount of champagne and whisky, and slept for only three or four hours a night. How he lived to 90 I have no idea.“But he had clarity of purpose in relation to the rise of fascism, in a time of appeasement, and he saw that war was the only way to stop it. This was his third war and he’d seen concentration camps – the British invented them in the Boer War – so he knew what Goering was up to, and that they were getting away with murder.”

Where Cox says Churchill came into his own was through his mastery of language and ability to turn words into inspiration through his speeches.

“He was a master of the English language and his writing was almost Shakespearean. It was his oratory that got him through, that made him at that moment a man of destiny. He became the conscience of the UK and a bolsterer with these incredible speeches. He really stepped into his destinal position, like Mandela or Napoleon, through believing in his principles.”

n Churchill (PG) is at Bridport Electric Palace on Saturday July 22 at 7.30pm.