Actor’s actor … Ian Holm in King Lear at the National Theatre in 1997. Photograph: Robbie JacK

'This is the best moment of my life,' he said, lying in the bath: Ian Holm remembered

Richard Eyre, Anne-Marie Duff, Ken Stott and Hugh Hudson pay tribute to the screen and stage actor who died on Friday


Richard Eyre, Anne-Marie Duff, Ken Stott and Hugh Hudson
Mon 22 Jun 2020 13.03 BST

That sense of emotional ruthlessness was what made him such a brilliant Lear

Richard Eyre

Ian Holm was, as it was so often said, the actor’s actor. Not because he was virtuosic, meticulous, droll and charismatic, all of which he was, but because he always drew the audience in, he always withheld something mysterious – something under the skin, something of the soul – and the audience always came to seek it. It’s no surprise that he was Harold Pinter’s favourite actor.

Ian Holm in Alien

Ian Holm: a life and career in pictures

Ian Holm was born on 12 September 1931 in Goodmayes, Essex. He graduated from Rada in 1953 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960. Here he is with two other young RSC actors Ian Richardson and David Warner at Stratford-upon-Avon on 15 December 1963

The Homecoming, 1966

His performance in the RSC production of Harold Pinter’s play at the Aldwych theatre in London (here with Vivien Merchant) won him the Tony award for best featured aActor in a play in 1967

Obituaries / Ian Holm

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Sir Ian Holm obituary

Acclaimed actor whose dazzling career included memorable roles in Alien, Chariots of Fire and The Lord of the Rings

Michael Billington and Ryan Gilbey
Fri 19 Jun 2020 18.37 BST

Ian Holm, who has died aged 88, was a brilliant actor in all media whose career fell into distinct phases. On stage, he enjoyed a dazzling early period and triumphant later years, most especially in Shakespeare and Pinter; but, if there was a prolonged period when Holm was absent from the theatre, it was because he suffered a temporarily paralysing form of stage fright. The theatre’s loss, however, was the cinema’s gain. He transferred the vocal precision, technical skill and impish mischief he had displayed on stage to the screen, enjoying a new, late-flowering career in scores of movies including, most notably, the Lord of the Rings cycle.

Ian Holm with Judi Dench in the 1985 film Wetherby.

Ian Holm: a virtuoso actor of steel, sinew – and charm

Alien, Lord of the Rings, Chariots of Fire and so many more extraordinary performances in classic films – what an exemplary career the actor Ian Holm, who has died aged 88, leaves behind

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 19 June 2020

There was always a cool, rational, weighted intelligence in Ian Holm. On screen, he was never exactly a heart-on-sleeve performer; he did not need or even appear to want the audience’s sympathies. Holm could be a mandarin and almost priestly presence, but always with a pressure cooker of emotion inside. He brought a commanding strength and a stillness to his work, a less-is-more economy that gave him what few theatrical knights have had since Olivier: equal success on stage and screen. He was a character actor with star quality.

It is funny that younger cinema audiences knew and loved Ian Holm for perhaps the most atypical casting of his career: as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.