22 June 2020 - British actor Ian Holm dies at age 88
Sir Ian Holm: Lord of the Rings and Alien star dies aged 88
(BBC News, 19/06/2020)
Stage and film actor Sir Ian Holm, who played Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings films, has died aged 88.
Sir Ian, Oscar-nominated as Olympic running coach Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, also played the android Ash in 1979's Alien.
"It is with great sadness we can confirm that the actor Sir Ian Holm CBE passed away this morning at the age of 88," his agent said in a statement.
Actor Ian Holm, Who Played King Lear To Bilbo Baggins, Has Died
Anastasia Tsioulcas (NPR, 19/06/2020)
Veteran British actor Ian Holm has died at age 88. He was beloved by audiences as Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Chariots of Fire, and first reached wide audiences in Alien. His death on Friday was related to Parkinson's disease, his agent, Alex Irwin, told NPR.
Ian Holm could play everyone from King Lear to an android to a hobbit. He told NPR's All Things Considered in 2002 that he was less interested in fame than in being a good actor.
Ian Holm invented Shakespeare acting in the modern age of film
Trevor Nunn (The Guardian, 21/06/2020)
As television news tributes have said, Ian Holm is best known for his performances in the films Chariots of Fire and Lord of the Rings. But to me, the name Ian Holm stands for something altogether different. For me, he is the genius who invented contemporary Shakespeare acting.
As the close-up naturalism of film and television became the staple expression in the 1960s, the danger was that Shakespeare stage performance would be increasingly seen as rhetorical, bombastic, external and, in the pejorative sense, theatrical.
Ian Holm’s Ways of Seeing
Anthony Lane (The New Yorker, 21/06/2020)
For people who love movies or the stage, the death of a favorite actor is an event. Not the end of an era, exactly, or the fall of a curtain: more a dimming of the lights. No longer, we realize, will certain corners of experience receive such illumination. When it was announced on Friday, for instance, that Sir Ian Holm had died, at the age of eighty-eight, those of us who had always admired him were left not merely saddened but bereft. Now that he is gone, where can we turn for such economy of gesture and for so compellingly steady a gaze? Who else can persuade us, as Holm did, that, before we begin hectoring or hungering for the world, it needs to be studied?