It’s taken me a couple of days to process the passing of Ian Holm. I find it difficult to explain what a strange and magical effect the great English actor had on my life, popping up every few years in one or another of my favorite films, only to be followed by years of silence. The first time I saw him was in Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien, in which he played the duplicitous and tragically repressed science officer Ash. His performance was something of a revelation for me (even at the age of twelve, when I saw the movie three times in the theater). Understated yet mesmerizing, he held his own in one-on-one scenes with the beautiful and smart Sigourney Weaver (or maybe she held her own with him—it’s hard to say). Together, they sold the idea that these were real people on a real ship facing a real motherfucking monster.
The next big movie I saw him in was 1981’s Chariots of Fire, in which he played a different kind of character, the witty and eccentric coach Sam Mussabini, who trains the brilliant but self-defeating runner Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross). With a glittering eye and a shrewd glance, Holm’s Mussabini sizes up Abrahams both as an athlete and as a person, calculating how to soothe the young man’s hatred of racism (which matches Mussabini’s own) as well as his crippling fear of failure. It’s a performance of amazing subtlety and warmth, for which he won a BAFTA as well as a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars.
His next major appearance was, surprisingly, on television, in 1988s Game, Set, Match, a John le Carré-style tale of espionage based on a set of novels by Len Deighton. Holm said he took the role because he thought it might be his last chance to play the leading man in a bang-up popular film. (He was right; his next opportunity came in 1996’s The Sweet Hereafter, which was anything but popular.) In Game, Set, Match, Holm plays Bernard Samson, a world-weary MI6 agent who struggles to unravel the tapestry of deception and betrayal that overlaid Cold-War Germany. Once again, it’s a perfect performance by Holm, and I wish more people could see it.
But, of course, most film fans today know Holm as the elder version of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. The fact that so many people responded so powerfully to him in this role is remarkable considering he had only two majors scenes through all three films: the first, in his Hobbit house when Gandalph comes to visit, and the second, in Rivendell, when he encourages Frodo before the younger Hobbit embarks on his own adventure. As usual, both of these scenes take on a deeper dramatic impact than would have been possible with a lesser actor. Who else could get away with the moment in the Rivendell scene, when Bilbo briefly transforms into a hissing monster when he catches a glimpse of his “old ring” hanging around Frodo’s neck? With most actors, the scene would have degraded into unintentional hilarity, but Holm manages to reveal a tragic aspect of Bilbo’s character, an old man who only now realizes how has debased himself in the service of an addiction.
Holm, like Bilbo, will be sorely missed.
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