Pete Postlethwaite had one of those faces — weathered, folded, kneaded, endlessly interesting — that demanded to be on camera, even as it denied him any possibility of leading man status.
And yet, in the latter half of his career, Postlethwaite, who sadly passed away yesterday after a lengthy battle with cancer, made a convincing case for the character actor as star. Neither his visage nor his gratifyingly alliterative name threatened more than a career as “that guy,” but somehow we got to know him better than that.
The turning point, of course, was a hard-earned and wholly unexpected 1993 Academy Award nomination for “In the Name of the Father” (speaking as we were, recently, of nods that came without any precursor warning), his granite-hard and quietly mournful performance as Maguire Seven convict Giuseppe Conlon joining a gallery of performances I cited last year as one of the finest Oscar fields in history.