Peter William "Pete" Postlethwaite, OBE, (pron.: /ˈpɒsəlθweɪt/; 7 February 1946 – 2 January 2011) was an English stage, film and television actor. After minor television appearances including in The Professionals, Postlethwaite's first success came with the film Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988. He played a mysterious lawyer, Mr. Kobayashi, in The Usual Suspects, and he appeared in Alien 3, Amistad, Brassed Off, The Shipping News, The Constant Gardener, The Age of Stupid, and Romeo + Juliet. In television, Postlethwaite's most notable performance was as the villain Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill in the Sharpe television series and television films opposite actor Sean Bean's character of Richard Sharpe.

Postlethwaite was born in Warrington, Lancashire, England in 1946. He trained as a teacher and taught drama before training as an actor. Steven Spielberg called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him on The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He received an Academy Award nomination for his role in In the Name of the Father in 1993, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2004 New Year Honours list. He died of pancreatic cancer on 2 January 2011.

Early life

Postlethwaite was born in Warrington in Lancashire (now part of Cheshire) on 16 February 1946. He was the fourth and youngest child of William (1913–1988) and Mary Postlethwaite (née Lawless; 1913–2000). He was brought up in a working class Roman Catholic family with two sisters, Anne and Patricia, and a brother, Michael. He trained as a teacher at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill and taught drama at Loreto College, Manchester, before training as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Career

Postlethwaite started his career at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where his colleagues included Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, Antony Sher and Julie Walters. Postlethwaite and Walters had an intimate relationship during the latter half of the 1970s. He was a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and other acting companies.

On 13 January 1981, he took the leading role in a BBC TV black comedy by Alan Bleasdale, The Muscle Market, which was a spin-off from Boys from the Blackstuff; it was part of the Play for Today series and also featured Alison Steadman.

After other early appearances in small parts for television programmes such as The Professionals, Postlethwaite's first film success came with the film Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988. He received an Academy Award nomination for his role in In the Name of the Father in 1993. He is well known for his role as mysterious lawyer Mr. Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects. He also made appearances in several successful films, including Alien 3, Amistad, Brassed Off, The Shipping News, The Constant Gardener, Inception, and as Friar Lawrence in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

In 2003, he was both the physical and vocal actor for the villain Deeth in Zixx: Level One, a Canadian TV series created by IDT Entertainment. The same year, he went to Australia and New Zealand, touring a 90-minute one-man play called Scaramouche Jones where he played a clown trying to find out why he is who he is before he dies at midnight, receiving a nomination for the TMA Award for Best Actor and winning the Theatregoers' Choice Award for Best Solo Performance. This was directed by Rupert Goold, who would also direct his Lear in 2008, in which Postlethwaite played every character. As well as Australia, the play toured Canada, New Zealand and the UK to great acclaim.

In the 2004 book The Art of Discworld, Terry Pratchett said that he had always imagined Sam Vimes as 'a younger, slightly bulkier version of Pete Postlethwaite'.

Steven Spielberg called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him on the The Lost World: Jurassic Park, to which Postlethwaite quipped: "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, 'The thing about Pete is that he thinks he's the best actor in the world.'"

One of his more notable roles was as antagonist Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill in ITV's Sharpe series, which starred Sean Bean. Postlethwaite has said that this was one of his favourite roles and that he and Sean played so well off each other because of their mutual love and respect. Bernard Cornwell, the author and creator of the Sharpe series, specifically wrote Hakeswill's character in later novels to reflect Postletwaite's performance as the character in the TV series. Postlethwaite also co-starred with Sean Bean in When Saturday Comes.

Postlethwaite next starred in the Liverpool stage production of King Lear in 2008 at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, and at the Young Vic, London. He appears in the climate change-themed film The Age of Stupid, premiered in March 2009. Having recently installed a wind turbine in his garden, he said was extremely impressed by the film and made an impassioned call for action on climate change on its release in The Sun newspaper; "The stakes [of climate of change] are very, very high. They're through the roof. How could we willingly know that we're going into extinction... and let it happen."

Terminally ill, Postlethwaite had a minor role in the 2010 blockbuster hit Inception, playing an industrialist who is similarly dying. Also in 2010, his performance in The Town as florist and crime boss Fergus "Fergie" Colm was well received by critics. Postlethwaite's last appearance on screen was in Nick Hamm's film Killing Bono, based on the memoir of Neil McCormick. The role was written specially for Postlethwaite to accommodate his illness. The film was released on 1 April 2011.

His final role was due to be in the BBC series Exile, written by Danny Brocklehurst and Paul Abbott, but he had to pull out because of ill health. Jim Broadbent replaced him in the role.

Awards

Postlethwaite was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2004 New Year Honours list and received an honorary degree from Liverpool University in 2006. He received an Academy Award nomination for his role In the Name of the Father.

Personal life

Postlethwaite lived in West Itchenor, West Sussex, before moving to Shropshire, near Bishop's Castle, with his wife Jacqueline (Jacqui) Morrish Postlethwaite, a former BBC producer, whom he married in 1987 in Chichester. Postlethwaite was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1990, and had one testicle removed. He left behind two children, both of whom were born in Shropshire: son William John (born 1989), a drama student at LAMDA, and daughter Lily Kathleen (born 1992). Postlethwaite was a smoker from the age of ten. In a March 2009 interview with Scotland on Sunday, Postlethwaite commented on his smoking habit, stating: "We've got to hope the next generation will do things differently. I'm sure that in 20 years' time the kids will say: 'Can you believe that people actually used to smoke – put these funny little things in their mouths, lit them and sucked all that crap into their lungs?".

Postlethwaite appeared as a taxi driver in one of the Labour Party's political broadcasts during the 1997 general election. He marched in London against the Iraq War in 2003. He was an activist calling for action to prevent climate change. At the UK premiere of The Age of Stupid on 16 November 2009, he told Ed Miliband, then-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, that he would return his OBE and vote for any party other than Labour, if the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station was given the go-ahead by the government.

Illness and death

Postlethwaite was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March 2009, from which he died at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital on 2 January 2011.