In the movies, an actor's face is his fortune. It isn't simply a matter of being good-looking enough to play the romantic hero or rugged enough to carry an action picture. It's about having an instantly available, readable screen personality; it's also about attitude, a continuous professional battle-readiness: Hollywood talks about someone having their "game-face on" or having "the chops" for a certain job. And perhaps no actor's career or industry presence has been defined by his face more than Pete Postlethwaite: the British character actor whose rugged features made him every casting director's go-to guy for raw, lived-in truth.
The stark planes and bulges of his face created a veritable Easter Island statue of authenticity and plainness. On camera, his face read as "real", in counterpoint to all the prettyboy or prettygirl leads. It was impossible to imagine him young, yet neither was he old exactly. For around a quarter of a century he played the same approximate middle age, with the face of a man whose life had been hard-earned, and whose dues had been paid in full long before.
Postlethwaite was not ugly. Nothing so banal. The film world is full of ugly people who don't work much. Actually, Postlethwaite could look rather handsome in a gaunt, ruined and troubled sort of way. His face could suggest brutality, cruelty and violence – or precisely the opposite. It could be the face of a man who was stoically enduring these things, and quietly and heroically declining to reply in kind. His face had a gentleness and sweetness that the brush of Lucian Freud could not, I think, catch. But the camera lens did.
He began as a stage actor, a stalwart of the Liverpool Everyman and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and two years ago toured extensively with his much-admired Lear. But it was as a screen actor that he was best known, and established the poles of his potent personality with two early movies: Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father (1993). In these, he played fathers good and bad. For Davies he was the violent and domineering working-class patriarch, a bully whose death liberates the entire family. In Sheridan's true-life drama about the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of the Guildford Four, this persona was turned on its head. Postlethwaite played Guiseppe Conlon, father of Gerry Conlon. Guiseppe is the innocent, law-abiding blue-collar guy in 70s Catholic west Belfast whose only concern is to stay out of the way of both police and Provos, and who senses that his tearaway son Gerry, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is about to get into serious trouble. So he sends him to London, where Gerry gets fitted up for the Guildford pub bombings and where Guiseppe finds himself wrongfully arrested too, having come to London on a doomed mission to bring his boy home.
There is a scene of almost unbearable pain when Gerry discovers his father in the same prison, being humiliated by the prison guards, smothered with delousing powder. Postlethwaite's face – stark and anguished like a ghost – made an unforgettable impression. The role earned Postlethwaite an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, and I believe Postlethwaite's overwhelmingly powerful performance as Guiseppe Conlon, the tragic, sacrificial figure who was to die in prison before his son is released, actually played an important part in popularising a new conciliatory mood in the political circles of 1990s Britain, which was to lead to the Good Friday agreement. At the very end of his career, Postlethwaite was to play Fergie Colm in Ben Affleck's drama The Town (2010), a West Belfast hard man in Boston, a villain who is the very antithesis of Guiseppe. It was a powerfully memorable role – and I sometimes wonder if some Hollywood producers assumed that Postlethwaite, the granite face of integrity and street-level toughness, was Irish. Actually, of course, the Warrington-born Postlethwaite was a Brit.
What gave Postlethwaite his iconic status with another kind of moviegoer was his portrayal of the sinister, uncanny Mr Kobayashi in Bryan Singer's modern noir The Usual Suspects (1995). In the course of its head-spinning plot, Kobayashi emerges as a man who works for, or claims to work for, the mythical criminal mastermind Keyser Söze. Söze is an underworld Satan, and Kobayashi is his emissary on earth, and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie certainly allows the audience to suspect at various stages that Kobayashi is, in fact, Söze himself in devious disguise. Who is this man? Kobayashi appears to be South Asian, which doesn't obviously fit with an apparently Japanese surname. He appears, smiling enigmatically, with his employer in the film's penultimate scene. This small part used Postlethwaite's unique looks in a different way, a starkly unsentimental way, to bring out their absolute alienness, and otherness. There were plenty of rough-looking, ordinary-featured, or semi-handsome guys in the film, from Kevin Spacey to Stephen Baldwin. It features the brutal-looking Dan Hedaya in a small role – not an oil painting, by any means. But none of these guys had a face that could suggest an unearthly, uncanny difference from the norm – beyond mere ugliness – which Postlethwaite's could.
These pictures established his reputation and led to his appearing in some of the most successful and liked films of the 1990s: he was the wise Friar Laurence in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy transplanted to modern-day "Verona beach". As the colliery band leader Danny in Mark Herman's Brassed Off (1996), Postlethwaite's face is a joy as he conducts a quietly passionate rendering of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez in a montage-sequence showing the dark backroom deals over pit closures that will affect everyone's future. He smiles, his baton movements calm and authoritative, with a connoisseur's appreciation of the music, occasionally wagging his head dreamily, keeping in check his growing euphoria at the skill of their new lead trumpeter Gloria, played by Tara Fitzgerald. It's an object lesson in less-is-more acting.
Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) was the real-life slave-mutiny drama, narrated in flashback from subsequent legal proceedings, which gave Postlethwaite another villainous role. He was William S Holabird, an icy-hearted lawyer who seeks to suppress and undermine any evidence of illegal slave-trading that could set at liberty the captured Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) and his fellow West Africans. Steven Spielberg, in awe of Postlethwaite's presence and beguiled by his personality, hailed him as "the best actor in the world". Modestly, Postlethwaite responded that Spielberg must have said that "he thinks that he's the best actor in the world".
He was certainly one of the most colossally loved and admired. One of his final screen appearances was in Franny Armstrong's ecological documentary The Age of Stupid (2009), in which a man known simply as The Archivist, speaking in the future, broods over humanity's failure to do anything about environmental catastrophe. Somehow, only Postlethwaite could have carried it off: he gave the film a natural presence, a bedrock of unflashy common sense, and was unfakably a warm, compassionate guy.
Postlethwaite had had health issues for many years, but the news of his death is still a shock, and a very sad way to start the new year. This unassuming, brilliant actor seems to have staked his final claim on our hearts at the moment of leaving: he was the national treasure we didn't know we had, until we didn't have him any more.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario