Pete Postlethwaite’s Leaps of Faith

“The truth is, I thought it mattered,” remarks Pete Postlethwaite’s Danny Ormondroyd, impassioned to give a rousing defence of his community in the moving finale of Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996). ​“I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks? Not compared to how people matter,” he continues. Danny leads a colliery band in the fictional Yorkshire town of Grimley, where the local coal pit is under threat of closure, leaving a community on the brink. Danny is steered by a set of unequivocal principals. Amidst financial hardship, he expects his horn players, trombonists and percussionists to pay their monthly dues, and holds a resolute conviction that the band will save the pit, guide the community out of obsolescence and slay the Thatcherite dragon. Like many of Postlethwaite’s protagonists, Danny is guided by a belief in something greater than himself. It’s all a question of faith. 

As a boy in his hometown of Warrington, Postlethwaite’s path to faith appeared more direct, his working class Catholic roots inspiring visions of ministry. Though he dropped out of the seminary, it left an indelible mark on the man. After a short stint teaching drama and a storied career on stage, he was 42 when he finally came to wider acclaim with the release of Terence Davies’ 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives. Embodying the rageful patriarch in Davies’ mesmerisingly redolent family album of violence, love and repression, Postlethwaite taps into a uniquely Old Testament sort of wrath. We’re introduced to him not by way of his auspiciously distinct face, but through his legs. Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), the middle child of the family, is on her knees, scrubbing a basement floor, when she asks her Father for a few bob to go dancing. Davies elects to keep his camera low, staying with the daughter, while we only see Postlewaite’s bottom half – a faceless dictator ruling above her. A couple of coins trickle down on the girl from above, a reprieve of throwaway mercy, before Father rains fire and brimstone on her via a beating with a broomstick.

There’s doubtlessly a fatherly thread through Postlethwaite’s oeuvre. Similar to his patriarch in Distant Voices, Still Lives, his absent billionaire dad Maurice Fischer in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and even Danny in Brassed Off, whose musical obsession threatens near-fatal consequences for his own son, Postlethwaite’s most memorable performances are often defined by relationships to their children. It was a theme the actor felt ambivalent about: ​“the theories were neat, but I didn’t buy them,” he posits in his autobiography. It’d be difficult to disagree with Postlethwaite: there are shades to his patriarchs. 

His portrayal of a devoted Dad in Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film In The Name of the Father is a case in point: Guiseppe Conlon is all about conviction. Wrongly imprisoned for a role in the 1974 IRA bombing of a Guildford pub, Guiseppe is subjected to the shadowy ills of the British deep state and locked up for nearly five years before passing away in his own jail cell. In defiance of his failing health, he spends his years in the nick scurrying up and down stairs to the prison’s postroom, scribbling letters of his innocence to those brave enough to listen. Despite being subject to one of the 20^th century’s gravest injustices, Postlethwaite’s Guiseppe retains an inscrutable faith that the British legal system will right its wrongs and one day set him free. 

It’s a faith in love and reconciliation that guides Postlethwaite’s Friar Lawrence in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 gaudy modern retread of Shakespeare in Romeo + Juliet, where the actor’s preteen seminary dream finally comes to fruition. With a celtic cross tattoo etched into his bronzed back, we initially happen upon Lawrence as he knocks back a thimble full of some hyper-cyan coloured spirit and dabbles in a spot of horticulture. Luhrmann’s Verona is a lurid and tempestuous place in which intensity of feeling rules the day. While in Distant Voices, Still Lives, Postlethwaite’s furrowed features project a maniacal severity, here that same face imbues a profound warmth; an unshowy magic in his demeanor that brings a steadfast and even-tempered idealism to the chaos. Lawrence’s desire for peace by uniting the houses of Montague and Capulet anchors reality to the feverish alien world these characters inhabit. Amdist star-making turns, it’s Postlethwaite’s fatherly friar that instills heart and empathy. 

In Brassed Off, Postlethwaite’s Danny journeys to find that same empathy. He experiences a damascene conversion after the pit closes and his son attempts suicide, finally grasping that he’s ignored his son and community in favour of brass fanaticism. He turns that righteous indignation on the conservative agenda which has bled his parish dry: ​“over the last ten years, this bloody government has systematically destroyed an entire industry, our industry,” he proclaims in front of thousands at the Royal Albert Hall, as the ensemble win a brass band championship. ​“And not just our industry: our communities, our homes, our lives.” After refusing the honour, Danny stares down the camera and leads the band in ​‘Land of Hope and Glory.’ Postlethwaite was quick to joke about his rugged look, describing his face as a ​“fucking stone archway,” but paired with melancholic brass, he employs his burning eyes and craggy cheekbones to devastating effect. It’s a look of furious solemnity. What hope? What glory? The pit is dead. This is a funeral march for a community’s way of life.

That same Postlethwaite intensity can be seen in 1976 as part of Gael Dohany’s Occupy!, a documentary-cum-play about the struggle to set up a worker’s cooperative at a factory in Kirkby. Playing a version of scouse union leader Jack Spriggs, he breaks the fourth wall, issuing a fierce polemic about the importance of factory sit-ins to win worker’s rights. The seeds are sewn for the quiet moral ire of Danny and the violent passions of Father in Distant Voices, Still Lives. 

Opposite him in Occupy! are his Everyman Theatre peers Bill Nighy and Julie Walters. In the 1970s, under the politically engaging artistic direction of Alan Dossor, the repertory’s realist radicalism brought George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht to the bracing Mersey riverbanks. The state-educated Postlethwaite came up during this vibrant hotbed of ideas; a golden period for the democratisation of the arts. He sustained himself on a diet of Tom Courtenay and Shirley Anne Field, working class actors who, as Postlethwaite put it: ​“made stuff that meant something to people.” Their success made him realise that ​“you didn’t have to be poncey to be an actor.” Though he spent his early acting years bouncing between friends’ sofas, he was aided by a greater emphasis on social mobility and a more kindly welfare state which allowed additional leverage for artists to survive. In 2026, when 35% of BAFTA-nominated actors are privately educated, five times the UK average, who does a future Pete Poslethwaite look up to on screen? 

The same neoliberal forces that tore Grimley apart have leeched away at Britain’s creative industry. Despite it all, both Danny and Pete were up for the fight. In the early 1980s, Postlethwaite was performing with the Bristol Old Vic when the same theatre announced it was to stop funding the locally loved Little playhouse. Rekindling the spirit of Jack Spriggs, Postlethwaite formed a ​‘Save the Little Committee,’ desperate to preserve a theatre known for community engagement, drawing up petitions, publishing pamphlets and agitating the suits. In the face of the Old Vic’s threatened closure, the committee took on the coming spring season themselves with Postlethwaite as artistic director, whose faith in local civic theatre would fortify the group for a further six seasons. Like band leader Danny, his belief in his players, in civic action and in his own artistic ability kept a community afloat. After he stepped down as director, he was again out of work. ​“Any chance of a sofa?” he asked a mate in Manchester. Faith sustains.