New move for Weta
Ian Holm, a versatile British actor whose long career included roles in Chariots of Fire and The Lord of the Rings has died. He was 88. Holm died peacefully last week in a hospital, surrounded by his family and carer, his agent Alex Irwin said in a statement. His illness was Parkinson’s-related.
“His sparkling wit always accompanied a mischievous twinkle in his eye,” Irwin said. “Charming, kind and ferociously talented, we will miss him hugely.”
Holm appeared in scores of movies big and small, from costume dramas to fantasy epics. A generation of moviegoers knows him as Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.
He won a British Academy Film Award and gained a supportingactor Oscar nomination for portraying pioneering athletics coach Sam Mussabini in the hit 1982 film Chariots of Fire.
His other movie roles included Father Cornelius in The Fifth Element, android Ash in Alien ,a smooth-talking lawyer in The Sweet Hereafter, Napoleon Bonaparte in Time Bandits, writer Lewis Carroll in Dreamchild and a royal physician in The Madness of King George.
He was also a charismatic theatre actor who won a Tony Award for best featured actor as Lenny in Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming in 1967.
He was a longtime member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, though a bout of debilitating stage fright that struck during a production of The Iceman Cometh in 1976 kept him off the stage for many years.
“I think it happens quite often to actors,” Holm said in 1998.
“They lose their nerve. They may think it’s a crazy way to make a living, or whatever. I was fortunately gainfully employed in the other media. I could have frozen in front of a camera, and I would have had to become a chimney sweep or something.”
He returned to live performance and won a 1998
Laurence
Olivier Award for best actor for his performance in the title role of King Lear at the National
Theatre.
Holm was knighted in
1998 for his services to drama.
Mia Farrow said he was
“among the giants of the theatre”.
“We met while working at the RSC where, mid-performance of
Iceman Cometh, terror seized him and he left the stage
— for 14 years,” she tweeted.
“He worked in films and TV— unfailingly brilliant.”
Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Gregory Doran called Holm “one of the RSC greats”.
“Ian was entirely original. Entirely a one-off,” Doran said. “He had a simmering cool, a compressed volcanic sense of ferocity, of danger, a pressure cooker actor, a rare and magnificent talent. There’s a great spirit gone.”
Holm was married four times and had five children.
Weta Digital, the Academy Awardwinning visual effects company that made The Lord of the Rings and Avatar possible, is making original animated content for cinemas and streaming for the first time in its 25-year history. The company also said this week that Prem Akkaraju had joined the New Zealand-based shop as CEO.
Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, the married filmmaking team behind The Lord of the Rings and majority stakeholders in the company, plan to write, produce and direct several of the projects for Weta Animated.
“We are huge fans of animated storytelling in all of its forms, but it can be a long, protracted, and often costly way to make movies,” Jackson said. “That’s, in part, why we have created this company — to change the model and open the doors to filmmakers and storytellers who might not otherwise be given the chance to show what they can do.”
Weta Digital was founded in 1993 to produce the special effects for Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. —
AP