Pete Postlethwaite, 1946-2011

I last saw Pete Postlethwaite on screen a couple of months ago in Ben Affleck's terrific heist drama The Town. The film features, in my opinion, the best ensemble cast in a film released in 2010 and Postlethwaite's brief but compelling performance perfectly fits among the remarkable work of Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Chris Cooper, Jon Hamm or Rebecca Hall.

And yet, for all the quality of his work in the film, what was really worryingly striking was the signs of the actor's health deterioration. His already characteristic lean face had turned into a gaunt, haggard expression of its old self. Those ominous signs proved to be right yesterday when we learnt that Pete Postlethwaite had died on Sunday, January 2, in Shropshire, England, after a long battle with cancer. 

Postelethwaite had a long and brilliant career as a stage, film and television actor. His distinctive, unusual looks rendered him the ideal character actor, usually in working-class roles. One of his finest parts in his pre-Hollywood career was as the wife abuser in the film Distant Voices, Still Lives.

For me, he will always be the Giuseppe Conlon of In the Name of the Father. As the wrongly accused and convicted father of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guilford Four accused of the IRA's Guilford bombings, Postlethwaite was the embodiment of working-class dignity and unshakable faith. His excellent work in that film earned him an Oscar nomination and marked a turning point in his career.

He went on to appear in numerous popular films like The Usual Suspects, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Brassed Off, Romeo + Juliet or The Shipping News. Although he was less present on screen during the last decade, he had a remarkable comeback in Hollywood last year with roles in Inception and in the already mentioned The Town.

Pete Postlethwaite was 64 when he died on Sunday, January 2, 2010.