Celebrated British actor Ian Holm has passed away aged 88, his agent has announced today. The actor, whose roles include Alien and The Lord of the Rings, had been battling a Parkinson’s related-illness.
“It is with great sadness that the actor Sir Ian Holm CBE passed away this morning at the age of 88,” reads the official statement. “Charming, kind and ferociously talented, we will miss him hugely. He died peacefully in hospital, with his family and carer.”
Holm began his career with the Royal Shakespeare Company and mixed stage and TV productions throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, including a Tony Award-winning performance in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.
Quitting the theater in the mid-70s, Holm would enjoy big screen success with his role as the android Ash in 1979’s Alien and followed that with a BAFTA-winning and Academy Award nominated turn in 1981’s Chariots of Fire.
That year also saw him voicing Frodo Baggins in a BBC Radio adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s A Lord of the Rings; he would of course return to Middle-earth in the 2000s, playing Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, as well as the first and third Hobbit movies.
Among Holm’s many other credits are Time Bandits, Brazil, Naked Lunch, The Madness of King George, The Fifth Element, and The Sweet Hereafter and From Hell.
