Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

6079 Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. His name has become a metaphor for the man in the street, the unwitting and innocent victim of political machination. In the book, Winston is a clerk for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so that they match the current party line, which changes daily. This involved retyping and reprinting newspaper articles and retouching photographs—mostly to remove individuals who had become "unpersons." The original (more accurate) document was dropped into a "memory hole", which supposedly led to an incinerator.

In the novel, Winston is lured into joining a secret organization whose aim is to undermine the dictatorship of "Big Brother". He does not realize that he is being set up by O'Brien, a government agent. When captured and tortured, he eventually betrays his only accomplice, Julia, the woman he loves, and he discovers that the underground movement, the Brotherhood, which they believed themselves to have joined may not exist. The character was born about 1945 and Orwell chose his name from Winston Churchill with Smith being used because it is a very common surname.

The character of Smith has appeared on television and in film in various adaptations of the novel. The first actor to play the role would be David Niven in an August 27, 1949 radio adaptation of the novel for NBC's NBC University Theater. In the BBC's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) he was played by Peter Cushing, and eleven years later in another BBC adaptation, by David Buck. In the 1956 film, Edmond O'Brien took the role and, in the more faithful adaptation 1984 (1984), John Hurt played Winston. In a dramatisation broadcast on BBC Home Service radio in 1965, Patrick Troughton voiced the part.

External links

NBC University Theater recording of 1984