Ian Holm, a British actor whose roles demonstrated remarkable dramatic range, from Shakespeare dramas to a hobbit in “The Lord or the Rings” trilogy to an Oscar-nominated performance as a track coach in “Chariots of Fire,” died June 19 at a London hospital. He was 88.
His agent, Alex Irwin, announced his death. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
The classically trained Mr. Holm spent more than a dozen years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The venerated actor Laurence Olivier once nicked him on the finger during a sword-fighting scene in a 1959 production of “Coriolanus” in Stratford-upon-Avon.
“I’ve still got the scar,” Mr. Holm said proudly.
Mr. Holm was primarily a character actor, known for exploring roles that drew on his verbal precision and subtle psychological insights.
He had already won a Tony Award on Broadway in 1967, in Harold Pinter’s “Homecoming,” and had won many of Britain’s top acting honors before he became widely known to a new generation in director Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Mr. Holm played Bilbo Baggins, the big-footed hobbit in “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001) and “The Return of the King” (2003).
“I can tell you that I had a ball except when it came to becoming a hobbit, which was tough,” Mr. Holm told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002. He spent four hours in the makeup room before his scenes. “The fur on the feet itched so badly and the ears would fall off. I never got used to them.”
He was astonished at the popularity of the “Lord of the Rings” franchise, noting, “I’ve had more fan mail and adoration from tiny tots than I’ve had for anything else.”
Despite his background in the theater, Mr. Holm “unequivocally” preferred acting in film, in part because of severe stage fright that occasionally flared. During a 1976 production of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in London, he froze up in the middle of a monologue and went to his dressing room, where he was found in the fetal position.
“Something just snapped,” he said years later. “Once the concentration goes, the brain literally closes down. It’s like a series of doors slamming shut in a jail.”
Except for a production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in 1979, he did not appear in the theater again until the 1990s.
Meanwhile, he had no nervousness in front of the camera and appeared in scores of film roles, including science fiction, fantasy, comedies, police dramas and costume dramas; at 5-foot-5, he played Napoleon three times. His 1981 role in “Chariots of Fire” was based on the real-life coach, Sam Mussabini, who helped British runner Harold Abrahams overcome anti-Semitism and self-doubt to win the title of the world’s fastest man at the 1924 Olympic Games.
At first, Mr. Holm’s character wasn’t sure Abrahams had the strength of will to take on his rigorous training program, saying, “You can’t put in what God’s left out.”
Mr. Holm, who was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for the role, “quietly dominates every scene he is in,” Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote.
Altering his voice, changing his appearance and gait, Mr. Holm was almost unrecognizable from one film to the next. He appeared as a calculating android in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979); as Napoleon in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” (1981); as a Belgian explorer who teaches Tarzan to speak English in “Greystoke” (1984); as Gena Rowlands’s husband in Woody Allen’s “Another Woman” (1988); as Polonius in director Franco Zeffirelli’s filmed version of “Hamlet” (1990) starring Mel Gibson; as an 18th-century physician in “The Madness of King George” (1994); and as a New York cop in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1996).
“I’m a chameleon,” Mr. Holm told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “I’m never the same twice, and I’m not a ‘movie star’ type, so people don’t demand that I’m always the same.”
Mr. Holm did not have a leading role in a film until 1997, when director Atom Egoyan cast him in “The Sweet Hereafter” as a lawyer who tries to persuade the parents of victims of a school bus crash to file a lawsuit. He struggles with his own psychic wounds while trying to persuade rural townspeople to reopen their personal tragedies.
“This is Holm’s best film role, and his performance is economical but amazingly expressive,” movie critic David Denby wrote in New York magazine. “He has often played hard, bitter men, but in his role as an intelligent man who does not know himself, he achieves the stature of a tragic villain.”
Ian Holm Cuthbert was born Sept. 12, 1931, in Goodmayes, England, and grew up in Worthing. His father, a psychiatrist, was the superintendent of a psychiatric hospital, and his mother was a nurse.
Mr. Holm — who later went by his middle name, which was his mother’s maiden name — was drawn to acting at age 7 when he saw a stage production of Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables.” He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1953 and joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and then the Royal Shakespeare Co. upon its founding in the early 1960s.
He said he did little preparation for his roles beyond reading — and memorizing — the text. Intensive method acting styles taught in the United States were not for him.
“I grew up with the great Sir Laurence Olivier, and I think it’s fair to say that a lot of actors my age were influenced by his very individual vocal delivery,” Mr. Holm said in an interview with ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre.
He also developed a subtly expressive style of acting well suited to film. Kenneth Branagh, who directed Mr. Holm in “Henry V” (1989) and “Mary Shelley’s Frankenseint” (1994), described this approach as “anything you can do, I can do less of.”
Mr. Holm’s personal life was, in his words, “pretty messy, to put it mildly.” After he revealed some of his many romantic liaisons in a 2004 autobiography, the British press dubbed him the “Lord of the Flings.”
His marriages to Lynn Shaw, Sophie Baker and actress Penelope Wilton ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife since 2003, artist Sophie de Stempel; two daughters from his first marriage; a son from his second marriage; two children from a long relationship with photographer Bee Gilbert; and eight grandchildren.
Mr. Holm made a triumphant return to the stage in the 1990s in Pinter’s “Moonlight” and a new staging of “Homecoming,” as well as a spellbinding performance in “King Lear” in London in 1998. During the climactic storm scene in Act III, in which the tormented Lear says, “Off, off ye lendings, come unbutton here,” Mr. Holm stripped naked, as if offering himself to the fates. His performance was widely praised and won numerous awards. He was also knighted in 1998.
In his 80s, Mr. Holm returned to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, playing “Old Bilbo” in two films directed by Jackson, including his final screen appearance, “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies” (2014).
“I really do love the process of film, and I never get bored,” Mr. Holm told the Toronto Sun in 1997. “Acting is about learning. If you stop learning, you might as well give up. I really believe that.”
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