Do we like Ian Holm?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and warm tributes from colleagues, but little on file about what he stood for beyond the work.
Nothing new on Ian Holm lately. He died in June 2020, and the coverage since is all remembrance. He was born in Essex in 1931, and he later called his childhood in and around a psychiatric hospital where his parents worked “a pretty idyllic existence”.
He trained at RADA and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company when it was founded in 1960. He won a Tony for Harold Pinter's The Homecoming and an Olivier for King Lear in 1998, the year he was knighted. He didn't hit film until his mid-thirties, then built a career on supporting roles and more than 90 features rather than leads.
Most people know him as Ash, the android in Alien, or as coach Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, which earned him a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination. For a generation he's Bilbo Baggins, who he played in The Lord of the Rings and returned to for The Hobbit. His last film role was in 2014's The Battle of the Five Armies.
On the harm check, honestly, there's very little to go on, which in this case is good news. We found no harmful statements about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no campaigns or conspiracy rabbit holes. His recent work was Jackson's Middle-earth films and a spread of mainstream cinema, with no sign of the culture-war studios. That said, he wasn't a public campaigner, so we can't point to causes he backed either.
On the good-person side, we found no court cases and no accusations in the reporting we read, which is a rare thing in showbiz. Tributes after his death were warm and consistent. Peter Jackson called him a “delightful, generous man”, quiet but “cheeky, with a lovely twinkle in his eye”, and his agent spoke of his wit and a mischievous twinkle.
We didn't find charity work or public stands taken at a personal cost, so the real good here is mostly his craft and how he treated colleagues. That's why he lands a solid pass on both tests rather than a gushing top mark. He gave generations of people characters to love and, by every account we read, was decent to work with.