Kenneth Colley, the British actor who appeared in seven options for director Ken Russell and portrayed the Darth Vader underling Admiral Piett within the Star Wars movies The Empire Strikes Again and Return of the Jedi, has died. He was 87.
Colley died Monday at his Ashford residence in Kent, England, of problems from COVID and pneumonia, his agent Julian Owen introduced.
For Ken Russell, Colley performed dramatist Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, youthful brother of the famed composer, in The Music Lovers (1971), and he did six different options with the director: The Devils (1971), The Boy Good friend (1971), Mahler (1974), Lisztomania (1975) — as Frédéric Chopin — The Rainbow (1989) and Prisoner of Honor (1991).
In a profession that spanned greater than 60 years, Colley additionally loved a fruitful affiliation with Monty Python and its members; he labored with director Terry Gilliam in Jabberwocky (1977) and with Michael Palin and Terry Jones on a 1977 episode of the BBC’s Ripping Yarns and performed Jesus in Lifetime of Brian (1979).
He had a stutter that he mentioned disappeared at any time when he was onstage or in entrance of a digicam.
Colley’s Firmus Piett served as first officer of the flagship Star Dreadnought Executor underneath Admiral Kendal Ozzel (Michael Sheard) in The Empire Strikes Again (1980), then assumed command of the ship after Ozzel’s loss of life by the hands of Vader.
He wasn’t anticipated again for Return of the Jedi (1983). “However I obtained a name from my agent saying there’s been a number of fan mail about this character and George [Lucas] has determined to place him within the subsequent one, do you wish to do it?” he recalled in a 2008 interview. “I mentioned positive, yeah. Who wouldn’t?”
He returned to play Piett as soon as extra within the 2012 animated telefilm Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out.
Born in Manchester on Dec. 7, 1937, Colley started his skilled performing profession in 1961 and went to carry out for London’s Previous Vic, The Royal Courtroom Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Firm.
Additionally within the Sixties, he confirmed up on episodes of The Avengers, Coronation Avenue and Emergency-Ward 10 and in such movies as How I Gained the Battle (1967) and Oh! What a Pretty Battle (1968).
Different notable roles included the Duke of Vienna in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for the BBC in 1979; a Soviet colonel in Clint Eastwood’s Firefox (1982); Adolf Eichmann within the 1985 NBC telefilm Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story; a Nazi within the 1988-89 ABC miniseries Battle and Remembrance; the pirate Ben Gunn on the 1986 Disney Channel miniseries Return to Treasure Island; and against the law boss on the BBC’s Peaky Blinders in 2016.
Colley’s work as Piett made him a preferred determine at Star Wars conventions and occasions all around the world.
“In the event you let it, it turns into a lifestyle,” he mentioned in that 2008 interview. “I believe we’re now into the third technology of individuals, who weren’t born, and it retains it alive. For me, the non-public expertise is a really very long time in the past, however this sort of secondary expertise is occurring the entire time. I’ve simply signed an image for somebody only a minute in the past. I believe it could outlive me.”