Ian holm

Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert was born on September 12, 1931 in the county of Essex, London. He comes from a family of Scottish descent heavily involved in medicine, as his mother, Jean Holm, was a nurse and his father, psychiatrist James Harvey Cuthbert, was one of the pioneers of electroshock therapy. When Ian was a teenager he suffered a severe blow, his older brother passed away.

After finishing school, Ian decided to teach acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His devotion to Shakespeare was such that at the age of twenty he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he would perform a handful of his works. He won the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor in the play “Homecoming,” his Broadway debut. In 1955 he married Lynn Mary Shaw, a stage actress whom he would divorce ten years later.

His jump to television came in the BBC miniseries The Wars of the Roses (1965), in which he played King Richard III. Three years later he directed his first two feature films: Bofors Cannon , where he played a military man and won the BAFTA, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream , an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Ian thus began a career in which he would work with countless stars.

She was directed by Oscar winner Richard Attenborough in Oh, What a Beautiful War! (1969), a musical about World War I, and Young Winston (1972), a biopic about Winston Churchill. In 1976 she acted in Shout at the Devil , a film directed by Peter R. Hunt . The feature film, set in the First World War, tells the adventures of three characters fighting against the Germans. After a decade of films with a war background, he played the robot Ash in the cult film Alien, the eighth passenger (1979). Just two years later he would star in another jewel of the Seventh Art: Chariots of Fire, a feature film set in the 1924 Olympics, thanks to which he received the Best Supporting Actor award at Cannes and an Oscar nomination.

In the eighties he married Sophie Baker, with whom he was only four years. In 1982 he would work on Brazil , a futuristic thriller directed by Terry Gilliam ; Another Woman allowed her to act under Woody Allen ‘s orders in a drama about a writer in crisis. In 1989 he played Captain Fluellen in Henry V , a historical drama directed by Kenneth Branagh and adapted from Shakespeare’s play. Just a year later he would be back in an adaptation of his beloved writer, with Hamlet , alongside Mel Gibson .. Her third marriage became official in 1991 and would last ten years. She also had a major role in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), playing Baron Frankenstein. The prestigious director Sidney Lumet had him in Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), a drama about police corruption.

His next feature films would focus on science fiction. In Luc Besson ‘s The Fifth Element , he would have an important role as Father Vito Cornelius; and in 1999 he worked with the flamboyant David Cronenberg on eXistenZ , a futuristic action thriller about a virtual reality game.

Already in the 21st century he was the villain who terrorized the streets of London in From Hell (2001). But the role for which the general public knows him the most is that of Bilbo Bolson, a hobbit with great significance in The Lord of the Rings (2001). He also acted in the third installment of the saga, and in another adaptation of Tolkien’s novels: The Hobbit . In 2003 he married Sophie de Stempel, his fourth wife.

As for his work on television, Holm has worked on a large number of series, such as Jesus of Nazareth  (1977),  released in two parts and directed by Franco Zeffirelli with a complete cast of stars, or The Borrowers (1992) was a fantasy miniseries about tiny characters in the real world, which years later would be adapted to the big screen. King Lear , (1998) ,  was another of the many Shakespeare adaptations that Ian Holm starred in and for which he earned an Emmy nomination .

Ian was the father of five children, who had three of his marriages.