THE EMPEROR

How the Sith Lord went from monkey to malice-master

THERE WAS A lot riding on the Emperor’s appearance in Return Of The Jedi. This wasn’t just any old villain. This was Darth Vader’s boss, a figure so evil he made the Dark Lord Of The Sith breathe funny. Well, funnier.

So George Lucas and director Richard Marquand decided they weren’t going to do what had been done for the Emperor’s brief appearance in The Empire Strikes Back. Namely, cast an old woman in a hood with a chimpanzee’s eyes superimposed over hers for full-on freakiness (true story). This time, the Emperor was going to be corporeal, sharing screentime with Vader and Luke Skywalker. So he needed a proper actor. And, in the shape of Ian Mcdiarmid, noted stage thesp, that’s exactly what he got.

That may seem daft, given how gloriously, twodimensionally evil the Emperor is in Return Of The Jedi.

But there’s subtlety in Mcdiarmid’s performance, particularly impressive given the prosthetics, and an intensity that inspires Mark Hamill to hitherto unseen heights for their final confrontation.

It wasn’t until the much-maligned prequels, though, that Mcdiarmid was really let loose. He’s essentially playing dual roles, twirling an imaginary ’tache as Darth Sidious while stroking an imaginary goatee as the seemingly sympathetic Chancellor Palpatine. All the while, he infuses Palpatine with a hint of menace, culminating in his monologue about Darth Plagueis in Revenge Of The Sith, when he effectively turns the character into Satan, tempting Anakin Skywalker to take a bite from the apple. It’s an incredible, layered, nuanced turn from an actor who could all too easily have decided he was above such things. It’s not too much of a leap to state that Mcdiarmid delivers the best performance in all of Star Wars. Just imagine how much better he would have been with a chimp’s eyes glued to his forehead.