Pete Postlethwaite, 1946-2011
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?Actor Pete Postlethwaite has died after a battle with cancer. This may come as a surprise to people — it sure did me — because Postlethwaite was in three movies in 2010 (Inception, The Town, and Clash of the Titans) and didn’t appear ill in any of them. You can probably attribute that to some degree to how great an actor Postlethwaite was, and to a greater degree that he was a total badass.
He didn’t have the nerdiest of careers, but Postlethwaite starred in flicks like Dragonheart, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Aeon Flux, Solomon Kane, and many more; he was acclaimed for his work in other movies, including Amistad, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, The Usual Suspects, In the Name of the Father, and more. He wasn’t the most well-known actor by name, but everyone knew his rough-hewn, distinctive face. All in all, he was a damn fine actor, and will certainly be missed.
About The Author
Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.