2008 - Mordechai. Religious debate in the shadow of death among Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz. An outstanding achievement, grueling but ultimately uplifting, with an excellent script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and fine acting from a committed ensemble.

2006 - Robert. Contemporary ensemble comedy, via director Frank Oz, of farcical calamities and revelations at an English funeral.

2003 - George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Lively, extravagantly sweeping 4-hour drama encompassing the complex political and personal struggles of Charles II. Excellent script (Adrian Hodges) and direction (Joe Wright), gorgeous visual design and an outstanding cast. Avoid the butchered and bowdlerized 3-hour U.S. version, titled The Last King.

2003 - No-longer-young Jolyon Forsyte.

1999 - Joseph Lees. Romantic drama (set in rural 1950s England) of a young woman caught in a complex emotional bind between two men. Beautifully acted by Samantha Morton and the rest of the cast, and beautifully photographed.

1997 - Septimus Warren Smith. Vanessa Redgrave plays the title role in Eileen Atkins's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel. RG's searing performance as a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War provides some welcome grit amid the gentility.

1996 - Paul Prentice. Two old school chums meet up literally by accident; one of them has had a sex-change operation. This unlikely romantic comedy works thanks in large part to fine lead performances by Stephen Mackintosh as Kim (formerly Karl) and RG as Paul, a 30-year-old with a strong adolescent streak.

1994 - Captain Greville. Alan Bennett's renowned comedy-drama of George III's breakdown and recovery. Marvelous ensemble cast surrounds Nigel Hawthorne's career-crowning performance as the King, with RG's sympathetic equerry hovering protectively in the background.

1988 - John Beaver. Sturridge directs Evelyn Waugh's satirical blast at the moral decline of the English upper middle class. Slightly gentler in tone than the novel but still devastating, and with a fine cast, including RG as an amiable, aimless sponger who drifts into an affair with a well-heeled married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas).

1987 - Alec Scudder. E.M. Forster's most personal novel, unpublished in his lifetime, about a middle-class Englishman struggling to come to terms with his sexual attraction to other men. A highly satisfying romantic drama, the most deeply felt of the three Merchant Ivory Forster adaptations, with RG memorable in his breakout role as the protagonist's working-class seducer/savior.