HERO: SIR THOMAS MORE

When the British actor Paul Scofield died in March of 2008, obituary writers noted that one of his most famous performances was that of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play and movie A Man For All Seasons.

I liked Scofield’s Oscar winning performance in the movie but I also liked what Robert Bolt, who wrote the script for both the play and the movie, said about Sir Thomas More:

At any rate Thomas More, as I wrote about him, became for me a man with an adamantine sense of his own self. He knew where he began and left off, what areas of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved. It was a substantial area in both cases, for he had a proper sense of fear and was a busy lover. Since he was a clever man . . . he was able to retire from those areas in wonderfully good order, but at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self. And there this supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person set like metal, was overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigor, and could be no more budged than a cliff.

That’s the type of person we need in all levels of government. But the question is could such a person even be elected?

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