Pete Postlethwaite

Yesterday I had bits of my skull pulled out by a military dentist wielding pliers and realized that the Bright Eyes song ‘Light Pollution’ isn’t an ode to socialism, like I thought, but rather an allegory for the failure of radical politics in America.

Oh, and Pete Postlethwaite died.



That’s Postlethwaite as King Lear in 2009. He was in so many good movies over the last twenty years: The Constant Gardner, Inception, the 1996 Romeo + Juliet, The Usual Suspects, Alien3. He was also in so many bad movies, from Jurassic Park to The Omen.

There’s an interesting passage in his obituary in The Telegraph:

He suffered from an abiding feeling at this stage that the acting life was not for his sort: “Those were the days when you were expected to have a dinner suit and bow tie. It really was 'Anyone for tennis?’” [Postlethwaite] recalled.

Of course you’d someone who grew up in the 1950s in a village between Liverpool and Manchester, the same industrial blue collar milieu that spawned The Beatles and Errol Flynn’s ghost writer, to be perhaps a little insecure in the tony West End. But England, a country with one of the most rigid caste systems this side of the Ganges, doesn’t have the born-into-show-biz stars that characterize Hollywood, official manufacturer of the American Dream.