Ian Holm: Career, Best Known Roles and What to Watch

Sir Ian Holm was a small man who could fill a screen. He played android traitors, Olympic coaches, French emperors and a hobbit, and he made each one feel distinct. Here is a guide to his career, his best known roles and the best places to start watching.

From the stage to the screen

Holm was born in Essex in 1931 and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His early reputation was made in the theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company became his base through the 1960s. He played a range of Shakespearean parts there, including a sharp, unsettling Richard III in the company's history cycle.

His biggest stage success came with Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. He played Lenny, a smiling, menacing brother, and won a Tony Award when the production reached Broadway in 1967. Pinter's pauses and half-threats suited him perfectly.

An attack of stage fright in the mid-1970s then kept him away from the theatre for almost twenty years. He put his energy into film and television instead, and that gap shaped the career most viewers know. He returned to the stage in the 1990s, and later took on King Lear at the National Theatre.

Best known roles

Ash in Alien (1979)

Ridley Scott's science-fiction horror gave Holm one of his most chilling parts. As the science officer Ash, he is helpful and polite until the film reveals what he really is. The calm, reasonable tone he uses for terrible news is the reason the scene still works.

Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire (1981)

Holm played the professional running coach who trains the sprinter Harold Abrahams. It is a warm, wounded performance, full of pride and quiet resentment at being treated as an outsider. It brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Napoleon, Kurtzmann and other oddities

He turned up in the work of several singular directors. In Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits he played a tiny, furious Napoleon, a comic turn he later revisited in other projects. In Gilliam's Brazil he was Mr Kurtzmann, a harassed boss in a world drowning in paperwork.

Period drama and Shakespeare

Holm worked often with Kenneth Branagh, playing Fluellen in Henry V and the title role's creator in Frankenstein. He was Polonius in Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet. In The Madness of King George he played the doctor who treats the monarch, a role that rewarded his dry authority.

Later film work

In The Fifth Element he was the gentle, flustered priest Cornelius. In Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter he gave a grave, heartbreaking performance as a lawyer in a grieving town. He was also part of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ and Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. He was knighted in 1998.

On television

Holm was never just a film actor. He played J. M. Barrie in the drama The Lost Boys, a portrait of the writer and the family who inspired Peter Pan, and it won him a BAFTA TV award. He also played Heinrich Himmler in the American mini-series Holocaust, a cold, bureaucratic study of evil. Later he took on Bernard Samson in the BBC spy adaptation Game, Set and Match.

Bilbo Baggins and Middle-earth

For many younger viewers, Holm is Bilbo Baggins. He appeared in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 as the older hobbit, kind, vain and slowly corrupted by the Ring. His scene at the party and his later, trembling moment of temptation in Rivendell are among the trilogy's most memorable. He returned for the later films, and for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, where he framed the story as the older Bilbo.

Holm brought a lightness to the part that never hid its sadness. A character who could have been merely cute became a figure of real pathos.

What to watch first

If you are new to Holm, these are the titles that show him at his best:

• Alien for the most famous twist of his film career.
• Chariots of Fire for his gentlest, most human performance.
• The Fellowship of the Ring for the role most audiences know him by.
• The Sweet Hereafter for a serious, mature drama.
• Brazil or Time Bandits for his comic side.
• The Lost Boys for his television work as Barrie.

Legacy

Ian Holm died in 2020, aged 88. He never played the conventional leading man, and he rarely needed to. His great skill was to make supporting parts the thing you remembered, whether by menace, fussiness or sorrow. Start with Ash or Bilbo, then follow the thread back to Mussabini and Lenny. You will see a remarkable range from one actor.