The shocking true story behind The Imitation Game

Publish date: 2024-03-23

He cracked the code of a legendarily impenetrable German war cryptographic machine called Enigma — but nobody could ever truly figure out British mathematician and inventor Alan Turing, subject of the new film “The Imitation Game.”

“His life was a puzzle,” says “Imitation Game” screenwriter Graham Moore. “His life was so burdened by secrets. We were trying to solve Alan Turing.”

Adapted in large part from the 1983 biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma” by Andrew Hodges, the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing and focuses on his years as a cryptographer for the British military during World War II. But that triumphant episode is bookended by the story of the end of his life, in which he was driven to suicide by the very government he helped save.

Turing was a gay man in an era when homosexuality was a criminal offense. He had never seen anything inherently shameful about it, but he always knew he had to keep that part of his identity a secret.

Born in 1912 in London, he found his life’s most formative friendship at the Sherborne high school, with a boy named Christopher Morcom. They were extremely close until Morcom died of tuberculosis four years later. “Christopher was the great love of his life,” says Moore. “He sent letters to Christopher’s family for the rest of his life. He never fell in love again.”

As Turing grew older, he would have brief affairs and one-night stands. But his lifelong passion would become multiple-use computing machines, which would eventually become known as Turing machines — and the predecessors of the modern-day computer.

“His work was asking all the big questions,” says Moore. “He was as much a philosopher as he was a mathematician. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be alive? Why do we consider one thing alive and another thing not alive?”

Churchill said that Turing had the single most important achievement of anyone during the war.

 - Morten Tyldum
Turing’s unorthodox approach to machines and math was confounding to many others in the academic arena, making both facets of his life equally alienating for him. As Hodges writes, “Like any homosexual man, he was living an imitation game, not in the sense of conscious play-acting, but by being accepted as a person that he was not ... Less acute, though equally persistent as a problem in his life, he had to fit into an academic system that did not suit his particular line of thought.”

The genius mathematician found a kindred spirit, though, in another pioneer: Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley in the film), whom he enlisted to be a member of the government cryptography team he worked for.

He eventually proposed marriage to Clarke, in order to keep her with him in South England, where Britain’s intelligence organizations were based. But he couldn’t go through with the wedding, confessing to her that he was gay.

They remained friendly, though, and worked together on the task at hand: breaking the code of the German machine called Enigma, which the Nazis used to send daily encrypted messages about war activity. To the initial doubt of his team, who toiled away deciphering a code that changed daily, Turing constructed a machine that would break the code every day. His success was hailed as one of the main reasons for Britain’s victory.

“Churchill said that Turing had the single most important achievement of anyone during the war,” says “Imitation Game” director Morten Tyldum. “It saved millions of lives. And it was all kept secret. He was never thanked or recognized for it. And he was later prosecuted by the same government, the same people.”

Several years later, Turing was arrested following a break-in to his home by a man with whom he’d been involved. Though he was the victim of a theft, he was brought up on charges of indecency and given the choice of jail time or chemical castration.

“It was a synthetic form of estrogen, a kind of treatment very briefly used in the early 1950s,” says Moore. “It ravaged his body and his mind.”

Two years later, Turing committed suicide by cyanide, using an apple as the delivery device.

The tragedy of Turing’s death, Tyldum says, gives the release of “The Imitation Game” all the more significance in restoring his legacy.

“He’s such an unsung hero,” says the director. “This is a movie that celebrates those [who] are not afraid to think differently, not burdened by normality. Instead of alienating that, we should celebrate and encourage it.”

Ironically, last December, Queen Elizabeth II issued a royal pardon of Turing, which the director shrugs off.

“There’s nothing to pardon. He was prosecuted for being a gay man. If anything, it’s him and his family who should pardon them — and us — for letting that happen.”

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