Anyone with a high school diploma or cable package that includes the History Channel should know an attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in "Valkyrie" fails.

The plot doesn't play out the way the Resistance fighters, many hiding in plain sight in the military, hoped. They had gambled their lives, and those of their wives and children, on a plot striking in its simplicity and sheer terror and peril.

"Very few people will know all about the end of the movie," British actor Bill Nighy said in a recent phone call. "They know, broadly speaking, that Adolf Hitler wasn't assassinated in the same way if you go and see 'Titanic,' you know the boat didn't make it."

Nighy's challenge, he said, was "not to play the end," which he might have been tempted to do as a younger actor who brought the whole of the story with him to the stage or screen.

"The suspense, really, is Bryan's department, and he's exemplary at that. He can really schedule the information and the images and make it as edge-of-your-seat as he possibly can."

Director Bryan Singer directs "Valkyrie," starring Tom Cruise as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, who joins forces with the German Resistance in a plot to kill Hitler and overthrow his Nazi government in 1943 and '44. Nighy is Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, who may have been involved with the Resistance longer than anyone in the movie, opening today.

"It's suggested from as early as 1937, which means he risked his life every day for several years, and then there is this extraordinary sequence where, when it comes to the final moment when he's required to make one phone call which could have changed the course of human history, he doesn't make the call. And it's breathtaking that history turns on such seemingly small things," which are dramatized in the movie.

If courage is being scared and doing it anyway, Olbricht may have been more courageous and suited to the careful planning and years of undercover work than decision-making under pressure.

Nighy, who made his first stage appearance in London 30 years ago and since has been recognized for screen work in BBC's "State of Play," "Love Actually," HBO's "The Girl in the Cafe" and "The Constant Gardener," tried to step into Olbricht's shoes but acknowledged his character was in a situation that remains unparalleled.

Although the movie introduces the von Stauffenbergs, Olbricht also was a devoted family man, and Nighy has seen touching photos from that period of the German's lovely daughter and wife.

"Like most of them, he had a great deal to lose. ... They knew they'd lost the war, they could have left it and waited for the Allies to turn up, but the disgrace of that and their profound disgust at what the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler were involved in emboldened them to try to do something about it."

Although Nighy and others knew David Bamber had been hired to play Hitler, it was still startling to see him in full regalia.

"He looks very, very spookily like the man. As an actor, you're used to seeing all kinds of people dressed up as all kinds of things, and it becomes routine to see people in ridiculous things or funny things or outlandish things or space sci-fi things or whatever -- I've played a squid, for crying out loud -- but there's nothing that prepares you when somebody walks in and looks exactly like Adolf Hitler."

If that weren't enough, Nighy and others filmed at locations where actual events occurred, including the exact patch of land where some executions took place.

Hitler had would-be assassins shot by firing squad and garroted with piano wire. "He had it filmed so he could watch it over and over again at his leisure, because he was so deeply thrilled by their deaths."

Nighy, whose turn as a squid came in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," followed "Valkyrie" with no roles requiring Nazi uniforms.

"I went to play somebody in Jerry Bruckheimer's 'G-Force,' a children's entertainment, which involves guinea pigs saving the world, so it was a pretty good contrast.

"And then I went to be a vampire to drink blood for a while in New Zealand for three months and then I went to be a rather damaged middle-aged music rock fan in Richard Curtis' new movie, 'The Boat That Rocked,' that we shot on a boat off the coast of Western England in the summer."

Also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans and Nick Frost, "The Boat" is about a pirate radio station in 1967. "It's a shameless excuse to play all the records from that year, which was a pretty good year."

The 59-year-old Nighy, who brilliantly played an aging, foul-mouthed rocker in Curtis' "Love Actually," says, "I remember when I was a kid and the music exploded and you couldn't get it anywhere until the pirate radio stations came along, and suddenly you could tune in and hear the Rolling Stones, Small Faces, the Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, the Who and all that American soul music."

No one can touch the performer Nighy calls the single most important artist in his life: Bob Dylan. He listens to him daily and just took delivery of 36 discs of rare and unreleased Dylan, now loaded on his iPod.

Borrowing a line used by Dylan when Johnny Cash died, Nighy says, "Bob Dylan is the star I steer my boat by. If I'm in trouble, I go to Bob and if things look up, I go to Bob. If it rains, I go to Bob; if the sun comes out, I take it to Bob."