I'm a mercenary soldier and we all look the same

[sovay]

I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.

I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.

He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.

Comments

[senmut]

Here from Network, and this is a lovely send up to an under-appreciated actor.

[gwynnega]

Damn it. I knew him best from his roles in The Devils and Mahler.

[selkie]

What pandemic? Where? *scowls*
Such waste. Such unforgivable quiet waste.

[greenwoodside]

Oh no :(

I knew him best as the Duke in the BBC Measure for Measure, a role he played as a sympathetic trickster more than a deeply dodgy manipulator. But I was always pleased to spot him amongst a cast, as is the way with favourite character actors.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, I'm sorry - I knew a few days ago, but I've just not been posting & you usually hear these things quite quickly, if they're actors you like.

Anyway, yes, he was marvellous! I noticed him first in the BBC Shakespeare Measure For Measure as the Duke and I can see I'm not alone; it's one of the earlier less-liked BBC Shakespeare's but one of my favourites of the series. (It's the one that also has Jacqueline Pearce as Mariana so Tim Piggott-Smith's Angelo will definitely be eviscerated after the credits roll. XD)

He turned up several times in my old telly viewing after that and was always so great - I'm forgetting which ones without going to look, but he was definitely in a couple of episodes of Fall of Eagles as a wild priest of some kind that I watched not long after - very different to the duke but as good as ever.

<3

Btw, probably of less interest to you, and who knows I may manage a post today or tomorrow, but just in case: Gerald Harper, aka Adam Adamant, has also left us, so it was not the week for elderly Brit character actors.

[asakiyume]

Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. --Aww, this is beautiful. Love it. "all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable," ahhh, yes. Yep.

(Also: wait. The Star Wars universe has an Endor and an Andor? Does it also have Indor, Undor, and Ondor? maybe Yndor?)

[minoanmiss]

Why did I read that as megafaunous scene?