The autobiography of Pete Postlethwaite, once called 'the best actor in the world' by Steven Spielberg
In the year or so leading up to his death from cancer this year, Pete Postlethwaite had been working on an autobiography, and this has now appeared, sympathetically ghostwritten by Andy Richardson. It is an extrovert, tender, charming and unselfconscious book, with some extraordinary, hell-raising and hair-raising anecdotes. Reading it revived the sadness I had on hearing about his death, particularly the last, remarkable chapter about his final illness, recounted as it was happening, like a sort of liveblog.
I hadn't quite grasped that before he became a screen icon, Postlethwaite was basically the rock'n'roll wild man of 1970s/80s subsidised theatre: a cheerfully uncaged party animal who made Dennis Hopper look like Margaret Rutherford, yet always showed up on time for rehearsals, where a succession of thin-lipped Oxbridgey directors would find every line of their interpretation, and every inch of their stage blocking, getting vigorously challenged by an actor who knew and cared more about Shakespeare than they did.
This young British stage performer at the Liverpool Everyman, the Bristol Old Vic and the RSC, a cradle Catholic from a working-class family in Warrington, with what he calls "a face like a fucking stone archway", became in the 1990s the Oscar-nominated screen star of movies such as Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives, Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father playing Giuseppe Conlon opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, and Bryan Singer's cult thriller The Usual Suspects.
Despite his dad evidently being the gentlest and most caring parent imaginable, and being himself a kindly and lovable man, Postlethwaite came to prominence playing agonised and sometimes scary father figures. In Davies's autobiographical Distant Voices, he was reportedly so compelling that Davies sometimes needed to sit on his lap, child-like, between takes. Steven Spielberg called him "the best actor in the world", and in one throwaway line, Postlethwaite reveals that Spielberg wanted him, not Tom Hanks, to star in Saving Private Ryan. Postlethwaite fancied a British tour of Macbeth instead.
Postlethwaite can, however, be a bluff and unrevealing narrator. Insights into his life and personality sometimes have to be read between the lines. This is particularly the case with regard to his love affair with the Liverpool Everyman's sparkling up-and-comer Julie Walters.
The affair began as they acted together as part of the Everyman's Van Load touring company in the 70s and finished just as her career was taking off with Willy Russell's Educating Rita, leaving his own career, at that time, way behind. Without describing his feelings much, or really at all, Postlethwaite sadly concludes that he was "incompatible" with the emotionally maturer Walters and signs off on the subject: "It was wonderful to see how successful Jules became; she enjoyed an inexorable rise . . . our time was through. I wished her all the best. I was thrilled for her, genuinely so."
Is there a quiver of remembered heartbreak there? His delicacy probably springs from respect for his current partner Jacqui Morrish, for Walters's privacy, and simply from a sense that this is not as important as the work. For Postlethwaite, acting was not a matter of calculated celeb-careerism, but an unfashionably passionate vocation.
Yet some of what he called his relative emotional immaturity comes across in his jaw-dropping off-stage high jinks. Postlethwaite liked a drink: seven or eight or nine pints were not uncommon in an evening, and there were times when he was getting through a Constable-sized haywain of weed. While at the RSC, Postlethwaite crashed his MGB roadster under the influence. At the time he was renting a cottage outside Stratford where he and director Nick Hamm would drop acid. Maybe our young RSC players stick to Diet Coke nowadays, but that was the way they rolled back in the 80s. There is no talk of therapy or substance-abuse counselling, though Postlethwaite quietened down when he got together with Morrish.
He seems to have come unstuck just once: during a production in Aberystwyth of, bizarrely, the ultra-trad repertory piece Ghost Train, by Arnold Ridley (the playwright who later became famous playing the ageing Private Godfrey in Dad's Army), Postlethwaite succumbed to a ganja-induced paranoid anxiety attack on stage. He thought everyone was out to get him, stormed out of the theatre and his part had to be taken over, then and there, by a young Bill Nighy. Quite a night. I wish I had been there ? in fact, I wish I had seen Postlethwaite's blistering performances on stage as well as on screen. This book reminded me what we're all still missing.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/23/spectacle-dust-pete-postlethwaite-review
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