Pete Postlethwaite

Peter William "Pete" Postlethwaite, OBE, (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, The Lost World: Jurassic Park 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. --- Postlethwaite was born in Warrington in Lancashire on 7 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. Early in his career, Postlethwaite was advised to adopt a new surname for his acting work by his first agent and by peers who quipped that his "would never be put up in lights outside theaters because they couldn't afford the electricity" (Postlethwaite rejected the advice). 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 Todayseries 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. --- 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 began a relationship with in 1987 and later married in 2003 in Chichester. Postlethwaite was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1990, and had one testicle removed. 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?" --- In March 2009, Postlethwaite was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, from which he died at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital on 2 January 2011. 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 1996). Postlethwaite continued acting almost to the end of 2010, showing clear signs of weight-loss during his last performances.