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.
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