“THIS isn’t the story of a local boy made good,” the late, great Pete Postlethwaite says in his new autobiography.
“It isn’t the tale of buckets and spades on the beach, flights over the Serengeti, handshakes with the Queen or being at the centre of the overblown Hollywood machine.”
What it is then is the story of an actor who always demanded roles he thought worthy, who saw acting as a force for good, who loved just two women deeply and who hated compromise.
It is a story that continued to write itself after the Warrington-born actor died of cancer in January, thanks to the help of writer Andy Richardson, who stepped in to help as Postlethwaite’s illness took its deadly grip.
A Spectacle of Dust, named for the tiny particles that fall to the stage, glinting in the halogen light, is both remarkably candid and dignified – not a tell-all, but a tell-just-enough.
And no matter whether he was on a Hollywood set or acting on a stage in Bristol, throughout his life his thoughts returned to the Liverpool Everyman – the theatre that gave him a job early in his career in a company that included Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, George Costigan, Matthew Kelly and Antony Sher.
He would return there to play King Lear as part of Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008, a role he had always longed to play, and one that gave him one of the most tumultuous periods of his career.
