The great grizzled British character actor Pete Postlethwaite has died, too young to go at the age 64.
Cinema audiences last caught a whiff of his menace in “The Town,” playing The Florist, the aged mobster who set up robberies and sent Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner and company off to take the risks while he ran his underworld from the cozy confines of a florist shop. He was in “Clash of the Titans,” and of course, “Inception,” and earlier, brilliantly,”The Usual Suspects,” “Amistad,” “Hamlet,” a very long list of pretty darned good credits.
There he was in “The Last of the Mohicans,” which I was watching on BluRay just last weekend. He classed up and working classed up many a film, mainly from the UK, from “In the Name of the Father” to “Brassed Off,” a film whose release afforded me the opportunity to catch up with him as he passed through Atlanta, promoting it.
That struck me as a piece particularly close to his heart, a dying brass band conductor for a coal mine band, fighting to keep the group together even as Britain’s coal mines were being shuttered and generations of workers put on the dole. He used the interview to grouse about Thatcherism, the callous destruction of people’s livelihoods, the class war the upper classes were waging, he thought, on the lower classes, under the mantle of British conservatism.
A onetime drama teacher, the product of a middle class upbringing, Postlethwaite went on to a career that earned him an OBE, “Officer of the Order of the British Empire,” which suggests his politics weren’t all that class conscious.
He was nominated for an Oscar for the Irish political prisoner protest drama “In the Name of the Father,” another politically charged piece that he embraced.
He looked old before his time, which is why his age, upon his death, surprised me. But he was damned good at what he did pretty much every time he did it.
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