‘Chariots of Fire,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ actor Ian Holm dies
IIan 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 theater he ran the gamut of Shakespeare, from the high-spirited 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 manqué 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.
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 theater 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 aging patriarch, in the same play, presenting it at a Harold Pinter festival at Lincoln Center 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.
Ian Holm Cuthbert was born on Sept. 12, 1931, in Goodmayes, England, northeast of London, to Jean Wilson (Holm) Cuthbert, a nurse, and Dr. James Harvey Cuthbert, a psychiatrist. Because his father was the superintendent of a mental hospital,
Holm was fond of saying that he had been born “in a loony bin,” hinting that it qualified him to be an actor
fter studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he made his stage debut at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1954 as a spear carrier in “Othello.” He was a member of the Shakespeare company there for two years, then made his London debut in 1956 in “Love Affair.”
Returning to Stratford with the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company, he quickly moved up in the ranks, along with Judi Dench, Ian Richardson and Diana Rigg. He played Sebastian in “Twelfth Night,” Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the Fool to Charles Laughton’s Lear.
Holm added Chekhov to his laurels in 1961. In a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Cherry Orchard,” starring Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Dench and Dorothy Tutin, he played the idealistic young intellectual Trofimov.
In films he played Napoleon in “Time Bandits” (1981); a thriving competitor of Tucci’s struggling restaurateur in “Big Night” (1996); the physician to the king in “The Madness of King George” (1994); and the scientist’s elderly father in Branagh’s “Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’” (1994). Other films included Terry Gilliam’s dystopian “Brazil” (1985) and Luc Besson’s science fiction drama “The Fifth Element” (1997).
On television, Holm did
“The Browning Version,” “Murder by the Book” (he was Hercule Poirot to Ashcroft’s Agatha Christie), “The Last of the Blonde Bombshells” (with Dench) and “The Borrowers,” a 1992 miniseries in which he appeared with his wife at the time, Penelope Wilton, who later played the widowed Isobel Crawley in “Downton Abbey.” ( That marriage ended in divorce in 2001.)
In 1976, at the height of his career, Holm was cast as Hickey in a London production of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” one of the most demanding of contemporary roles. During previews he suffered from stage fright so acute that it was later characterized as a breakdown. He left the production and, unable to perform in the theater, he concentrated on films and television, gathering a reputation for being outstanding in small roles in movies that included “Dance With a Stranger” (1985), “Greystoke” (1984), “Dreamchild” (1985) and “A Life Less Ordinary” (1997).
Holm was Frodo Baggins in the 1981 BBC radio version of “The Lord of the Rings.”
But later in his career he was much better known for playing another hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, in the highly successful “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movie trilogies. These were roles he was naturally suited to, not just because of his acting skill but also because of his size — at 5 feet, 5 inches tall, he had the perfect height for a hobbit.