A Big Name Goes Big Time

LEEDS, England — What a difference an Oscar nomination makes.

Three years ago, a hitherto obscure British actor, rejoicing in the splendid name Pete Postlethwaite, received an Academy Award nod as best supporting actor for “In the Name of the Father,” playing Giuseppe Conlon, the upright, almost saintly father of a young Irishman (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) wrongly convicted of a terrorist bombing.

The nomination came out of the blue. For 24 years, Postlethwaite had been unknown in Britain, let alone America; a respected theater actor often cast as a bad guy, he enhanced his income with guest roles on TV dramas. “That nomination,” he says gently, “made a difference.”

He understates. Since “In the Name of the Father,” Postlethwaite has become almost exclusively a film actor, appearing in a dozen movies in the last three years. He has an ability to show up in a few key scenes of a film and walk off with them by stealth, like an expert pickpocket.

Postlethwaite has played the friar who acted as a go-between for the young lovers in “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.” He was the mysterious old man who kick-started the fantasy element of “James and the Giant Peach.” Perhaps most memorably he was the enigmatic, fastidious lawyer Kobayashi in “The Usual Suspects,” quite unfazed at the prospect of being blown away by a bunch of crooks.

Oh, and along the way he made not one but two Steven Spielberg films in the past year. He has a key role in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” opening Friday, as a big game hunter on the trail of dinosaurs. And come fall, he will be seen in Spielberg’s “Amistad” as a prosecutor in the case of a group of slaves who mutinied aboard a ship transporting them to America.

Postlethwaite, 51, is quietly content about his late-flowering film career. “It wasn’t expected,” he said. “It’s been a bit of a bonus. If I had been 19 years old and what happened to me in the last three years happened then, you’d lose a sense of reality. As it is, I’m settled, I have a lovely, beautifully solid home background. Life is good.”

He is a self-effacing, considerate man without a trace of hauteur, but one sees why he was typecast as a heavy. Ruddy, angular and topped by thinning hair, his face, dominated by what may be a broken nose, carries a hint of menace until he smiles. Postlethwaite likes to joke that his career has been in his cheekbones, and he finds it ironic that after a quarter-century playing bad guys, his Oscar nomination came for playing a wholly virtuous man.

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Yet despite his appearance in a cluster of high-profile movies, only one exercises Postlethwaite’s thoughts currently: “Brassed Off” (which also opens Friday), a small British film set in 1992, about a coal mining community in Yorkshire, devastated when the government of Margaret Thatcher shuts down its colliery, citing economic reasons. Its miners are left to face a bleak future without work.

Many British mining villages have their own brass bands, which compete annually in national championships; they symbolize the gritty spirit that holds their communities together. Postlethwaite plays Danny, the conductor of the brass band in Grimley, the fictional village of “Brassed Off”; the band remains his primary passion even while the community around him is threatened by poverty and unemployment.

For a small film, “Brassed Off” (its title, a pun, is local slang meaning “angry”) has struck a real chord in Britain since its release late last year. Theories for its success abound. Despite its apparently bleak subject matter, it is funny, moving and heartwarming. It has a cast of excellent British character actors at the top of their form (only Ewan McGregor, who plays a young miner, has any international profile). Its story--about a small community fighting big, bad bureaucrats--has universal appeal. It also coincided with a growing dissatisfaction toward Britain’s conservative government, which came to a head this month when Tony Blair’s Labor Party routed it in the general election. Lastly, there is the brass band music itself, played by members of the award-winning Grimethorpe Colliery Band--somber and stately, but moving enough to make casual listeners break out in goose bumps.

“It’s a wonderful little film with a massive heart,” Postlethwaite said. “I’ve loved it to pieces from the first moment I read the script. ‘In the Name of the Father’ was the last film I felt like this about.”

He notes that writer-director Mark Herman, a Yorkshireman, was intrigued by the devastation of the region’s culture brought about by pit closures: “Mark’s heart was really in it, and he was left alone (by financiers Miramax and Britain’s Channel 4 and Prominent Features) to get on and write it.

“I have never received so many letters from people as I have about ‘Brassed Off.’ One woman wrote to tell me she’d never known her husband to cry in 35 years of marriage until they went to see this film. But he just sat there and blubbered.”

Indeed, one scene in “Brassed Off” has acquired legendary status in Britain for its tear-jerking qualities. At one stage in the story, Postlethwaite’s Danny, a longtime miner, succumbs to pneumoconiosis, a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling coal dust. As he lies in a hospital bed, his life in the balance, the members of the brass band assemble below his window and play a mournful rendering of “Danny Boy.” The scene virtually defies audiences to remain dry-eyed.

Postlethwaite thinks “Brassed Off” is “about people being disenfranchised and used as pawns, not having any say in what they do. On a cynical level, who would want to defend someone’s right to work down a coal mine? It’s a [expletive], terrible job. But despite those awful conditions, there was honor, values, a way of life and a real community. That’s what was being destroyed.”

Thatcher’s government confronted mining communities with a program of pit closures as part of its strategy to weaken unions. Postlethwaite took part in anti-government demonstrations on the miners’ behalf long before becoming involved in “Brassed Off”: “I marched with them, I was proud to do it, and I’d do it again.”

Much of “Brassed Off” was shot in Grimethorpe, the Yorkshire village on which Herman based his fictional community of Grimley: “What happened there in real life is the same as happened in the film,” Postlethwaite said. “Two weeks after their pit closed, the brass band, which is undoubtedly one of the best half-dozen in the world, won the national championships.

“Go to Grimethorpe now and it’s a devastated place. Houses are boarded up, people who own property can’t sell it. The pit has been concreted over. There’s no prospects for anyone to make a living.”

Postlethwaite does not read music and was taught to conduct by John Anderson, a lecturer at City of Leeds College of Music, who also assembled the music for the film’s soundtrack. “We made videos for Pete of the band in performance,” said Anderson, “and he learned the music by heart. He did very well.”

In fact, Postlethwaite cannot now get enough of conducting. He came to Leeds, the nearest major city to Grimethorpe, to make a guest appearance on Saturday, May 10, conducting the village’s Colliery Band at a concert featuring music from the film. He donned the distinctive purple uniform he wore in the film--and used the same baton presented to Danny by other band members. Accompanying him in Leeds was his 8-year-old son, William.

Even if “Brassed Off” is well received in America, Spielberg’s films will do more for Postlethwaite’s visibility. The director stepped into his life in March last year, when he asked Postlethwaite to fly from England to Los Angeles within 48 hours to read for “The Lost World.”

“And I said, ‘No,’ ” recalled Postlethwaite, chuckling at the memory. “I really did. My daughter, Lily, had been born just two days previously, and I felt I simply couldn’t go. But when Steven heard about this, he understood completely. And he sent me a script, saying, ‘Read it, and if you like it, the part’s yours.’ Which was wonderful.”

In “The Lost World,” Postlethwaite plays Roland Tembo, whom he describes as “the last of the philosopher-hunters, a classic hunter who tracks his prey on foot but has given it all up and retired. One of his trackers seeks him out and says, ‘How about bagging a T. Rex?’ So he comes back out of retirement.”

Postlethwaite enjoyed the film tremendously but was not prepared for Spielberg’s asking him to play a role in “Amistad” too. Nor was he prepared for the contrast between the two movies.

“Obviously ‘The Lost World’ has lots of special effects and it’s good fun--but on ‘Amistad,’ Steven really worked with the actors. It’s all about the spoken word. It’s a trial movie with very few special effects. But Steven loves actors, loves the spoken word and nuances in dialogue.”

Spielberg wrote to Postlethwaite that after seeing him in “In the Name of the Father,” he knew they would work together. “I treasure that letter,” he said.

Postlethwaite was born into a working-class Catholic family in the north of England. He taught for two years, gained a place at Bristol Old Vic drama school, but could not afford its tuition fees and became a sheet metal worker. “By the time I got in, I was 24, and the others were 18,” he said. “It’s a big difference. I was terrified.”

After graduation, he worked in provincial theaters, including a rewarding spell at Liverpool Everyman alongside such actors as Jonathan Pryce and Julie Walters. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for a world tour in 1984, and met Day-Lewis 15 years ago when he was acting at Bristol Old Vic and Day-Lewis was at its drama school. When Postlethwaite led a breakaway group trying to keep open Bristol’s Little Theatre, Day-Lewis joined him.

His tricky last name (pronounced poss-ul-thwait), which itself sounds like a Yorkshire mining village, initially caused problems: “My first agent wanted me to change it. So I changed him instead.”

This is typical of Postlethwaite, who is not susceptible to the glamorous trappings of his profession. He lives 150 miles north of London and its glittering actors’ hangouts, in the rural county of Shropshire with William, Lily and his partner, Jacqueline Morrish; they met while he was filming a BBC drama and she was assistant floor manager.

He takes pleasure in recounting anecdotes about his favorite film roles--especially Kobayashi, the non-Japanese lawyer with the Japanese name and the nonspecific accent who works for the mysterious unseen villain Keyzer Soze in Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects.”

“I thought the script was just fabulous,” said Postlethwaite. “Bryan asked me who I’d like to play, and I said I didn’t mind. He said it didn’t matter anyway, since all the characters were Keyzer Soze! Playing Kobayashi gave me my favorite ever review. One critic said this guy had a false tan, a false accent, a false suit and a false name--and still we believe him.’ For actors, reviews don’t get better than that.”

Postlethwaite’s fans believe his belated success is richly deserved. “Oh, you can never know that,” he said. “There’s circumstance and happenstance. If Daniel Day-Lewis, when they were preparing ‘In the Name of the Father,’ hadn’t said to [director] Jim Sheridan, ‘I know who my Dad should be’--which he did, by the way--what would have happened then?”

And Pete Postlethwaite, broadly smiling, gives a helpless shrug.