The Stage

Pete Postlethwaite

Published Monday 17 January 2011 at 15:50 by Michael Quinn

Pete Postlethwaite was 24 by the time he turned his back on teaching to enrol at the Bristol Old Vic. On graduating, he found himself a vital part of an era-defining crop of young actors gathered together by John McGrath at the Liverpool Everyman. With impossibly chiselled cheekbones and a face that was compared to a sack of spanners, he stood out in a company that included Antony Sher, Jonathan Pryce, Bill Nighy, Alison Steadman and Julie Walters, with whom he had a long relationship.

Over the next four decades, until his death at the age of 64, he established himself as one of the finest and best loved talents of his generation, excelling in theatre and television and gaining international fame in film.

He formed a vital working relationship with director Adrian Noble, first in Bristol, then Manchester (as a memorable Antonio to Helen Mirren’s Duchess of Malfi at the Royal Exchange, in 1980), and subsequently in several seasons for the RSC. His presence in any production lent it vital ballast and unmatchable humanity, often with a characteristically quiet bravura that stole scene after scene.

Although later hailed by Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg, who directed him in 1997 in the second instalment of Jurassic Park, as “the best actor in the world” - a complement the level-headed and modest Postlethwaite was always at pains to deflect - lead roles at Stratford where elusive. Instead, he found them elsewhere - Macbeth in Bristol in 1997, Prospero at the Royal Exchange a decade later and, just two years ago, a headline-grabbing return to the Liverpool Everyman as King Lear.

He made his television debut in 1975 in Mike Leigh’s Second City Firsts and was equally comfortable playing petty criminals in Minder (1982-1993) and Lovejoy (1993), as a bank robber desperate to mend his ways in William Ivory’s six-part series The Sins, for the BBC in 2000, or as the rascally Montague Tigg in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewitt in 1994, for which he gained a Bafta nomination.

His film roles were equally diverse and included Alan Bennett’s A Private Function (1984), Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Alien 3 (1992), and the following year, most conspicuously, as the falsely-imprisoned Guiseppe Conlon alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

In 1995, he played the pivotal go-between in Bryan Singer’s surprise hit The Usual Suspects and more recently appeared in a 3D remake of Clash of the Titans (2010), and with Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception (2010). His last role, in the homegrown Killing Bono for director Nick Hamm, will be released in April.

A committed environmental campaigner, in 2009 he made The Age of Stupid, a part-dramatised documentary about climate change.

Born into a strict Roman Catholic, working-class family in Warrington, Cheshire on February 16, 1946, Postlethwaite was awarded an OBE in 2004 and had survived a cancer scare in the nineties, before succumbing to the disease on January 2, 2011. He is survived by his wife and two children.