Actor Pete Postlethwaite, whose death earlier this month was greeted with a nationwide expression of sadness and affection, has told his own story in a memoir due out this summer.
Alan Samson, a non-fiction editor at the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, is pulling out the stops to publish the memoir, to be called A Spectacle of Dust, in June or July. He believes, he says, that the book will be "a great testament to a wonderful man".
Famous for his raw-boned features, which the head of the Bristol Old Vic drama school compared to "a stone archway", Postlethwaite was born into a Lancashire family and flirted with the priesthood and teaching before overcoming a belief that "working-class people don't become actors" and building a reputation as a prominent theatre performer.
He went on to have great success in TV and film, was Oscar-nominated in 1994 for his role in In The Name of the Father, and won acclaim for his turns in The Usual Suspects and Brassed Off! Steven Spielberg famously called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him on The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Sansom bought the autobiography in September, at Postlethwaite's instigation, and said an "eminently publishable" typescript of 100,000 words had been completed before the actor's death from cancer on 2 January, aged 64. Sansom is currently reading the early chapters.
"Even I was taken aback by the front-page media coverage and the outpouring of national affection and genuine warmth for this man. I share it myself," he said. "What I've read so far are the first chapters about his early years, his lifelong love of Liverpool, and his connection with the Everyman Theatre. It starts in medias res with the first production he was in there, King Lear with Michael Gambon as Lear, in 1983, then jumps to 2008 when he is in the same play at the same venue, but now playing Lear himself, before it flashes back to his upbringing and childhood."
Recollections of working with actors such as Julie Walters and Bill Nighy in the days before they were household names, a close friendship with Daniel Day-Lewis, "a brother from another mother", and Postlethwaite's sense of the importance of ensemble acting and the relationship of actors to one another are all key elements to the book. "What's come across so far is a great energy, and a sort of intensity," Sansom added. "He had a sense that acting was a vocation."
