Possessing broken-nose looks as distinctive as his name, stage-trained actor Pete Postlethwaite started out late in movies as a heavy, trading on the natural menace projected by his ruddy, angular face. He was over 40 when he made his first indelible cinematic impression as the brutal father in "Distant Voices, Still Lives" (1988), Terence Davies' powerful slice of post-war working-class life in Liverpool, England. Though small, gaunt and rather frail, the character terrorizes his family with his unpredictable rages and surprises them with occasional tenderness. This performance garnered Postlethwaite acclaim from an international audience and boosted his film career, yet few of his countrymen knew his name or could connect it with the character player they had seen many times on British television. Repertory work for the Manchester Royal Exchange, the Bristol Old Vic and the Liverpool Everyman had provided the backbone of his theatrical training, and he also performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1980s.
Postlethwaite's first film role of any note was the butcher in the comedy "A Private Function" (1984), and he followed up "Distant Voices" with parts in movies like "To Kill a Priest" (1988, an international co-production helmed by Agnieszka Holland), Franco Zeffirelli's "Hamlet" (1990, as the Player King) and "Alien3" (1992) before that year's "The Last of the Mohicans" reunited with Daniel Day-Lewis, an old pal from his repertory theater days whose recommendation would secure for Postlethwaite the powerful, star-making supporting role of Guiseppe Conlon in Jim Sheridan's "In the Name of the Father" (1993). As the father of Day-Lewis' Gerry Conlon--falsely accused of being the ringleader of a group of supposed IRA terrorists--he brought a quiet strength to a peaceful man who stands in dignified counterpoint to a war-like IRA leader and garnered a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination as the anguished heart of the turbulent film.
Since his breakout movie, Postlethwaite has become one of the busiest actors around (one survey showed only Harvey Keitel acting in more films over a three-year period), but the astonishing thing is not the quantity but the quality. Even in a part as unfeasible as Kobayashi in Bryan Singer's "The Usual Suspects" (1995), he is never less than believable, and more often than not demonstrates the heart of a pirate, stealing scenes with abandon (e.g., his con man Montague Tigg who got the better of Paul Scofield in a 1995 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"). Postlethwaite reached the MTV crowd with his saintly Father Laurence in Baz Lurhmann's modern take on "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" and he increased his exposure as a mysterious Old Man bearing a magical gift in the live-action portion of the stop-motion animation extravaganza "James and the Giant Peach" (both 1996). The following year, Steven Spielberg offered a one-two punch: the director offered the actor's highest profile turn to date as Roland Tembo, the English "philosopher-hunter" of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and then elicited a gemlike turn as the head prosecutor in "Amistad.”
Whether glowering with pent-up rage or displaying the selfless simplicity of soul, Postlethwaite brings authenticity, depth and originality to every part and, despite his work in big Hollywood movies, has not forsaken his British roots, even turning down an offer to act in Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) to return English soil. He was outstanding as Danny, the dying Yorkshire band leader, in "Brassed Off" (1996); the scene where he lies in a hospital bed with the members of his ensemble playing "Danny Boy" below his window is guaranteed to start the tears gushing. Postlethwaite also relished the tortured guilt of "Macbeth" on the British boards in 1997. His craggy face and colossal cheekbones not withstanding, he bared all (body as well as soul) in his first romantic role opposite Rachel Griffiths in "Among Giants" (1999), another movie about English working-class sensibilities. He also acted in American telefilms that year, portraying the Carpenter opposite Peter Ustinov's Walrus in NBC's "Alice in Wonderland" and Farmer Jones in TNT's adaptation of "Animal Farm.”
Postlethwaite returned to the big screen in “When the Sky Falls” (2000), playing a criminal insider who feeds information to a journalist (Joan Allen) investigating corruption and drug trafficking in Dublin. The crime-drama was based on the true-life story of Irish investigative reporter, Veronica Guerin. In the Irish fable, “Rat” (2001), he played a husband more in love with Guinness and betting on horses than his own wife, and is suddenly turned into a small ugly rodent in need of love and attention. But his dysfunctional family has different ideas of what to do with him. In “The Shipping News” (2001), Postlethwaite played the crusty editor of The Gammy Bird, a Newfoundland newspaper that hires a man (Kevin Spacey) returned to his ancestral home on a journey of self-discovery.
For the Canada-Italy co-production “Between Strangers” (2002), Postlethwaite was confined to a wheelchair, playing a former star athlete trapped in a bitter marriage to a drab Italian woman (a surprisingly unglamorous Sophia Loren). In “Triggernmen” (2003), a crime-comedy using the tired cliché of small-time crooks being mistaken for hitmen, he appeared as a gangland boss targeted for murder. The movie went straight-to-video in the United States. He next played an auditor suspicious of two old-timers feigning to be a same-sex couple on their tax returns in the stereotype-laden comedy, “Strange Bedfellows” (2004). After a skilled turn as the lurking superintendent of a haunted building on New York City’s Roosevelt Island in “Dark Water” (2005), Postlethwaite played a mysterious man tracked down by a diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) whose wife (Rachel Wiesz) is murdered after discovering massive corruption between the Kenyan government and the pharmaceutical industry.