NEW YORK, NY.- Tom Wilkinson, the actor who could transform a manic lawyer, a steel-foreman-turned-stripper and parts small and large into mesmerizing characters, winning Oscar nominations and plaudits for his performances in movies like “Michael Clayton” and “The Full Monty,” died Saturday, according to a family statement. He was 75.

The statement, from his agent sent on behalf of his family, said he died suddenly at home. It did not provide other details.

Wilkinson’s range seemed to know no bounds.

He earned Academy Award nominations for his work in “In the Bedroom” and “Michael Clayton” and delighted audiences in comedies like “The Full Monty” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

He appeared in blockbusters like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Batman Begins,” and took on horror in “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” history as Benjamin Franklin in “John Adams,” and memory in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

He often did not have the name recognition or sheer star power of the actors he played opposite — George Clooney, Sissy Spacek and Ben Affleck among them. But he drew audiences’ eyes and critics’ acclaim through decades of work in television and film and onstage.

“I see myself as a utility player, the one who can do everything,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I’ve always felt that actors should have a degree of anonymity about them.”

Wilkinson was born in Yorkshire, England, but his parents moved to Canada when he was 4, seeking better work than farming. Their stay lasted only six years, during which time his father worked as an aluminum smelter. The family returned to Britain, where Wilkinson’s parents ran a Cornwall pub until his father died, drawing Wilkinson and his mother back to Yorkshire.

Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Wilkinson said his life took a sharp turn at 16, at the King James’s Grammar School at Knaresborough, where the headmistresses “simply decided she would make something of me.”

But he was not drawn to acting until he reached the University of Canterbury in 1967, he said. After college, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he discovered that it was possible for “working-class kids from the provinces” to open art galleries, run rock bands, become designers, be actors.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.