Postlethwaite’s performance looks set to be one of the cultural highlights of the year

Dec 7 2007 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

WHAT should an actor look like? Square-jawed and handsome, smooth and oily with a pencil moustache, round-faced and jolly? Whatever your precon-ceptions of an actor’s looks, Pete Postlethwaite will disappoint.

He is a one-off in a world of conformity, possessing one of those craggy faces that looks like it has seen a bit of life and possibly been knocked around a bit, certainly a distinctive face.

It is a face that has found him work in a variety of roles, from the working-class hero of Brassed Off to a hunter in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

Now, aged 62, he is ready to tackle one of the most form-idable roles in theatre, King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragic hero driven mad by his ungrateful family.

In one of the worst-kept secrets in Merseyside theatre, it was announced this week he would be taking on the part at the Liverpool Everyman next October as part of the city’s 2008 celebrations as European Capital of Culture.

In fact, his appearance in the play was announced several months ago but then dropped. In one Daily Post interview, he said it was not going ahead.

It seems discussions on the project had been protracted but have finally come together. “You've got to get it right,” the Warrington-born actor told me following the announcement.

“I am very nervous about doing it and you need the right circumstances and elements – or potential elements – to do it really well. It is a mega-special event in an actor’s career and for any theatre – you don’t just do Lear glibly, you have to treat it very seriously.

“All the different chemical elements have to be as well prepared as you can make them and that takes time. There has to be the right concentration.

“And you need the right amount of money to do it, too. Obviously, you want to attract a quality cast and you need to get people to do the play because they want to do it, admittedly. But you also want to draw from the top shelf if you can.”

Matters have now been satisfactorily sorted. “The Everyman and Playhouse Theatres have worked brilliantly well to do this, the Culture Company has come up trumps, as has the director Rupert Goold’s company and Watershed.

“It’s the combination which matters, getting the right package. So, if we are going to fail, we are going to fail gloriously.”

One thing that attracted him to the project was performing it at the Everyman Theatre, where in the 1970s the teacher-turned actor cut his theatrical teeth.

He had begun his working life as a teacher, first in a boys approved school and then a girls’ convent. He gave that up for an acting job at the Bristol Old Vic and then the Everyman where he was part of an amazing team including Tony Sher, Julie Walters, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce and many others. “We were lucky,” he had told me, never finding a place quite like the Everyman since.

“It was important to do this at the Everyman. The Everyman means an extraordinary amount to me and I can say that very honestly and mean it, it’s not a glib, actory thing. It will be great to be able to have a go at the Everest of acting, the Matterhorn or whatever you want to call it.”

He has tackled some of Shakespeare’s most legendary characters including a touring Macbeth which came to the Royal Court, Liverpool – in which he claimed the throne to the song We Are the Champions – to Prospero most recently at the Royal Exchange.

He has never done Hamlet or Romeo, and never will. “I am much too old to play Hamlet, I am well past my sell-by date for that. But I have never been a romantic lead, anyway, I was always a character actor as I started late. | have never been a juve lead!”

Lear, he confesses, is an intimidating prospect. “But screw your courage to the sticking post and you’ll not fail,” he says, going against theatrical superstition by quoting lines from Macbeth in a theatre. “You get the right team around you, the right kind of momentum and impetus and the right kind of values, really. You have to do what you care about and know why theatre is important to you and a particular theatre and a particular city, Liverpool.”

Postlethwaite is undoubtedly now one of our most respected actors – Spielberg called him the best – and he has chalked up a series of famous film roles like The Usual Suspects, but he is in no rush to move to LA.

“I love going over there to film but I would not want to live there for a variety of reasons. It’s just not my cup of tea.”

He has for many years lived in Shropshire “near Wenlock Edge” with his partner and children. “There is something very real about England and my Englishness,” he says. “I am very precious about it, like my name, which is also very important to me.” It is said that, when an early agent suggested a name change, he changed his agent instead.

There is some film work to be done before Lear, but that’s not to pay for his theatrical work, he says. “There are theories about making films to pay for work in the theatre, but for me it is horses for courses, where things work best. I have never been snobbish about theatre, film or television work. I just want to go where the good writing is that can reflect the way we live in society today.”