Pete Postlethwaite

Who was Pete Postlethwaite?

Peter William "Pete" Postlethwaite, OBE, was an English stage, film and television actor. After minor television appearances including in The Professionals, his first success came with the film Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988. He played a mysterious lawyer, Mr. Kobayashi, in The Usual Suspects, and he appeared in Alien 3, Amistad, Brassed Off, The Shipping News, The Constant Gardener, The Age of Stupid, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Romeo + Juliet. In television, He played Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill on Sharpe opposite Richard Sharpe, played by Sean Bean.

Postlethwaite trained as a teacher and taught drama before training as an actor. Director Steven Spielberg called him "the best actor in the world" after working with him on The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He received an Academy Award nomination for his role in In the Name of the Father in 1993, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2004 New Year Honours list. A survivor of testicular cancer, he died from pancreatic cancer on 2 January 2011, aged 64.