2011 started badly for the cinema industry with the passing away of the British character actor Pete Postlethwaite and the beautiful Hollywood actress Anne Francis. Both deaths occurred on January 2.
• Pete Postlethwaite was an odd-looking but quite fascinating man, with a face that had prominent bony cheeks and a raw-boned figure.
These highly distinctive physical features were often used in a number of versatile roles, usually menacing but sometimes humble and most frequently as working-class types.
Postlethwaite was born on February 16, 1946, in Warrington, Cheshire, England, and he was the youngest of four children of William Postlethwaite and his wife Mary Lawless. He studied to become a teacher at St Mary’s University College at Twickenham and then began teaching at Loreto College, Manchester, before he studied acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Postlethwaite started his acting career on the stage with the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, and then he spent some time with the Manchester Royal Exchange before joining the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company.
He also appeared on British television in small parts on several popular shows, and occasionally played unimportant roles in feature films such as The Duellists (1977) and A Private Function (1984).
Finally, Postlethwaite got noticed as the sadistic father in the film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). The role gave him great reviews and popularity and it was a stepping stone for films like Hamlet (1990), The Long Day Closes, Alien 3, Last of the Mohicans and Waterland (all 1992). These good roles culminated in an Oscar nomination for his part in In the Name of the Father (1993).
Postlethwaite was critically acclaimed for his role of the mysterious lawyer in the film The Usual Suspects (1995), and director Steven Spielberg, who used him twice in his films, Amistad and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (both 1997), called him “the best actor in the world”.
Other films in which Postlethwaite appeared in include Brassed Off, Romeo and Juliet (both 1996), The Shipping News (2001) and The Constant Gardener (2005). Recently we saw him in Clash of the Titans, Inception and The Town (all 2010) and we still have to see him in Killing Bono (2011).
In 2004, he was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
Postlethwaite died from cancer in Shropshire, England. He is survived by his wife Jacqueline Morrish, whom he had married in 1987, and by their children, William and Lily.
• The long-legged Hollywood film actress Anne Francis was a natural beauty with lovely blue eyes, wavy blonde hair and a sexy mole right under her lower lip.
She started her show business career very early as a model and then she worked in radio drama and, as she was growing up, she appeared in several television shows and on the stage before breaking into the movies.
Francis was born in Ossining, New York, on September 16, 1930, and she was the only child of salesman Phillip Francis and his wife Edith Albertson.
When she was six, she was already modelling children’s clothes and then moved into radio work. She also attended drama lessons at the New York’s Professional Children’s School. By the age of 11 she had already made her Broadway debut in the play Lady in the Dark.
Francis has had an uncertain start in the movies. Discovered by MGM, she made her screen debut in an uncredited part in This Time for Keeps (1947),.
But after one more film, Summer Holiday (1948), she was getting frustrated by the lightweight treatment she was receiving and she headed back to New York to appear in the television drama Golden Age, and on the stage in summer stock.
Back on the screen she played a seductive juvenile delinquent in the low-budget picture, So Young, So Bad (1950). She so impressed studio heads at 20th Century-Fox that they signed her to a contract.
But films like Elopement (1951), Lydia Bailey (1952) and Dreamboat (1952) couldn’t raise her above the starlet typecast and as soon as her contract expired she went back to MGM.
Here, at last, Francis found more mature roles in films like Rogue Cop (1954), Bad Day at Black Rock, Blackboard Jungle (both 1955) and The Rack (1956).
Her figure and her beauty made her very popular in the highly successful science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet (1956).
She ended the decade with Don’t Go Near the Water (1959).
In the 1960s ,Francis concentrated on television as she guest-starred in some of the most popular shows. She was also very successful in the title role of sexy private investigator Honey West (1965-1966).
On the big screen, Francis was making sporadic appearances, mostly in low-budget films, the exception, perhaps, being The Satan Bug, Brainstorm (1965) and Hook, Line and Sinker (1969). Her final film was Lover’s Knot (1996).
In 1952, Francis married Bamlet Price but they were divorced in 1955; she then married Dr Robert Abeloff in 1960 with the marriage again ending in divorce in 1964 after producing a daughter, Jane Elizabeth. In 1970, Francis adopted a daughter, Margaret, in one of the first adoptions granted to a single parent in California.
Francis died in Santa Barbara, California, due to complications from pancreatic cancer.