Pete Postlethwaite

Born: February 7, 1945
Where: Cheshire, England

Postlethwaite's tale is a scarcely believable one of the rise of a Warrington sheet metal worker to an actor respected for his ability to snare quality roles.

His is the face of Kobayashi, Keyser Soze's deadpan go-between in 1985's The Usual Suspects, the dying Yorkshire bandleader in Brassed Off and the hunter-philosopher in Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

So it's strange to think of him as a teacher in a grim northern town or the foil to Victoria Wood's gallery of personalities in the comedienne's hit TV series.

Postlethwaite's acting career kicked off the Old Vic Drama School in Bristol, where he first met Daniel Day-Lewis with whom he was to appear alongside in The Last of the Mohicans in 1992.

His first taste of the big screen came in 1977 in Ridley Scott's The Duellists and - after a spell in the RSC - he impressed as the violent father in Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives.

Roles in Alien3, In The Name of the Father and Amistad followed and he had his first (unlikely) role as a romantic lead opposite Rachel Griffiths in Among Giants in 1999.

Most recently he appeared with Kevin Spacey as unsympathetic newspaperman Tert Card in The Shipping News.

Possessing broken-nose looks as distinctive as his name, Postlethwaite started out late (he was over 40) in movies as a heavy, trading on the natural menace projected by his ruddy, angular face.

He has become one of the busiest actors around (one survey showed only Harvey Keitel acting in more films over a three-year period), but the astonishing thing is not the quantity but the quality.

Recent work includes the American remake of the Japanese chiller Dark Water with Tim Roth and Jennifer Connelly.