Celluloid Celt

Star of the big and small screens, Gary Lewis talks Celtic and his latest flick, The Keeper.

- Joe Donnelly

THERE are few football stories quite like Bert Trautman’s. Once an Iron Cross-awarded Luftwaffe paratrooper and prisoner of war in WWII, the late German goalkeeper latterly married in England, signed for Manchester City, and played between the sticks in the Sky Blues’ 1956 FA Cup final win – having finished the match with a broken neck.

Trautman’s fascinating tale is told in The Keeper, the latest film to feature Glaswegian actor Gary Lewis. The Gangs of New York, Billy Elliot and Orphans star plays Jock Thomson (left), the Scottish manager who signed Trautman for City, despite a backlash from supporters and members of the media regarding the goalkeeper’s German Armed Forces background.

“Like most people, I knew the famous event behind the Bert Trautman story,

of him breaking his neck, but of course there’s a lot more to it than that,” said Lewis in an exclusive interview with the Celtic View. “The film goes so deep into the story, and it really questions some quite big issues. I thought it was very interesting, Jock Thomson’s involvement in the story – he came from a mining village up in Fife.

“Thomson didn’t quite reach the heights of Matt Busby, Bill Shankly or, of course, the great Jock Stein, but I found it curious that here was another Scottish coach from the mining community. I thought it was interesting to think there might be something in their background, how they managed challenging situations, or something like that.”