Obit: ‘LOTR’ actor Ian Holm dies
Character actor who eventually played leading roles, Holm had a magical malleability
Ian Holm, a virtuosic British actor celebrated for his performances in plays by Shakespeare and Harold Pinter and in movies from Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan to the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, died Friday in London. He was 88.
Isabella Riggs, an employee of his agents, Markham, Froggatt & Irwin, confirmed the death, in a hospital. She said the cause was an illness related to Parkinson’s disease.
A character actor who eventually played leading roles, Holm had a kind of magical malleability, with a range that went from the sweet-tempered to the psychotic. In the theatre he ran the gamut of Shakespeare, from the highspirited Prince Hal to the tormented King Lear, and he left his imprint on two roles in Pinter’s The Homecoming: the sleek, entrepreneurial Lenny and his autocratic father, Max.
In films, Holm incarnated characters of diverse geographic origin and nature, including a tough New York cop in Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), a big-city negligence lawyer in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and a bohemian genius manque in the title role in Stanley Tucci’s Joe Gould’s Secret (2000).
Exploring the world of fantasy, he was a malfunctioning robot in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003), from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jackson’s subsequent Hobbit films.
‘I’M A CHAMELEON’
Explaining his ability to immerse himself in such disparate characters, Holm said simply, “I’m a chameleon.” The transformation was emotional as well as physical, as he discovered new depths of compassion even in the most unlikely characters.
In 1993, overcoming a serious case of stage fright, he returned to the theatre after an absence of more than 15 years to star in Pinter’s Moonlight. Four years later he set himself the monumental challenge of King Lear at the National Theater in London. It brought him the Laurence Olivier Award as best actor. Playing Lear, he said, was “like climbing Everest with no oxygen.”
In 1989 he played Captain Fluellen in a film adaptation of Henry V. In his memoir, Beginning (1990), Kenneth Branagh, the director and star of the movie, said of Holm: “Acting with him was like playing a racket game with someone very much more skilled. One was never sure how the ball would come back, but it would always be exciting and unexpected.”
“He is a master of film technique,” Branagh continued. “I’d heard the Ian Holm School of Acting described as follows: ‘Anything you can do, I can do less of.’”
Holm was most closely identified with Pinter’s work. In 1965 he created the role of Lenny in The Homecoming, and he won a Tony Award after the play moved to Broadway two years later. He also played the role in a 1973 film version directed by Peter Hall.
Years later, in 2001, he took the role of Max, the ageing patriarch, in the same play, presenting it at a Harold Pinter festival at Lincoln Centre in New York and in London. The switch was as dramatic as his move from Prince Hal to King Lear. In fact, his Max had more than a touch of Lear.
When Holm opened in Lear, it turned out to be a defining moment in his career, bringing him rapturous notices. Piercing to the heart of the character as king and father, he exposed all his emotions, and at a crucial point, mad on the heath, he dropped his cloak to reveal an old man’s nudity.
“This is Holm’s Lear,” critic Sheridan Morley wrote in The International Herald Tribune, “and we are unlikely to leave this century with a better.”