“The truth is, I thought it mattered,” remarks Pete Postlethwaite’s Danny Ormondroyd, impassioned to give a rousing defence of his community in the moving finale of Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996). “I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks? Not compared to how people matter,” he continues. Danny leads a colliery band in the fictional Yorkshire town of Grimley, where the local coal pit is under threat of closure, leaving a community on the brink. Danny is steered by a set of unequivocal principals. Amidst financial hardship, he expects his horn players, trombonists and percussionists to pay their monthly dues, and holds a resolute conviction that the band will save the pit, guide the community out of obsolescence and slay the Thatcherite dragon. Like many of Postlethwaite’s protagonists, Danny is guided by a belief in something greater than himself. It’s all a question of faith.
As a boy in his hometown of Warrington, Postlethwaite’s path to faith appeared more direct, his working class Catholic roots inspiring visions of ministry. Though he dropped out of the seminary, it left an indelible mark on the man. After a short stint teaching drama and a storied career on stage, he was 42 when he finally came to wider acclaim with the release of Terence Davies’ 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives. Embodying the rageful patriarch in Davies’ mesmerisingly redolent family album of violence, love and repression, Postlethwaite taps into a uniquely Old Testament sort of wrath. We’re introduced to him not by way of his auspiciously distinct face, but through his legs. Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), the middle child of the family, is on her knees, scrubbing a basement floor, when she asks her Father for a few bob to go dancing. Davies elects to keep his camera low, staying with the daughter, while we only see Postlewaite’s bottom half – a faceless dictator ruling above her. A couple of coins trickle down on the girl from above, a reprieve of throwaway mercy, before Father rains fire and brimstone on her via a beating with a broomstick.
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There’s doubtlessly a fatherly thread through Postlethwaite’s oeuvre. Similar to his patriarch in Distant Voices, Still Lives, his absent billionaire dad Maurice Fischer in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and even Danny in Brassed Off, whose musical obsession threatens near-fatal consequences for his own son, Postlethwaite’s most memorable performances are often defined by relationships to their children. It was a theme the actor felt ambivalent about: “the theories were neat, but I didn’t buy them,” he posits in his autobiography. It’d be difficult to disagree with Postlethwaite: there are shades to his patriarchs.
His portrayal of a devoted Dad in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film In The Name of the Father is a case in point: Guiseppe Conlon is all about conviction. Wrongly imprisoned for a role in the 1974 IRA bombing of a Guildford pub, Guiseppe is subjected to the shadowy ills of the British deep state and locked up for nearly five years before passing away in his own jail cell. In defiance of his failing health, he spends his years in the nick scurrying up and down stairs to the prison’s postroom, scribbling letters of his innocence to those brave enough to listen. Despite being subject to one of the 20th century’s gravest injustices, Postlethwaite’s Guiseppe retains an inscrutable faith that the British legal system will right its wrongs and one day set him free.
It’s a faith in love and reconciliation that guides Postlethwaite’s Friar Lawrence in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 gaudy modern retread of Shakespeare in Romeo + Juliet, where the actor’s preteen seminary dream finally comes to fruition. With a celtic cross tattoo etched into his bronzed back, we initially happen upon Lawrence as he knocks back a thimble full of some hyper-cyan coloured spirit and dabbles in a spot of horticulture. Luhrmann’s Verona is a lurid and tempestuous place in which intensity of feeling rules the day. While in Distant Voices, Still Lives, Postlethwaite’s furrowed features project a maniacal severity, here that same face imbues a profound warmth; an unshowy magic in his demeanor that brings a steadfast and even-tempered idealism to the chaos. Lawrence’s desire for peace by uniting the houses of Montague and Capulet anchors reality to the feverish alien world these characters inhabit. Amdist star-making turns, it’s Postlethwaite’s fatherly friar that instills heart and empathy.