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andrasteTo say that waking up to today's newspaper headlines was a punch in the gut is underselling it - like, it isn't as if I hadn't done the maths. Having a favourite actor who is 39 1/2 years older than me meant I knew this would happen some day, and I suspected he hadn't been well the past couple of years because he was so much less in the public eye. And yet, I still spent half my work day scrolling Bluesky and misting up and trying not to either laugh out loud or cry at all the stories. 'I will miss him' is just inadequate.
It's not just that he was the impeccable embodiment of my favorite fictional character of all time and my favourite Starfleet captain and a Lucius Aelius Sejanus who made you understand why Livilla would poison her husband and a fantastic MacBeth and an even better Claudius. It's the funniest guest character in Frasier, his guest spot on The Simpsons, Jeffrey, The Green Room, every single thing he did with Sir Ian, the lobster Halloween costume, the foster dogs. Most of all that he was not only one of the best actors of his extraordinary generation of actors but according to everyone who ever met or worked with him managed to stay a genuinely kind person no matter how famous he became, ever determined to use his old white man powers for good.
Most of all I admired his advocacy against domestic violence. Speaking out against it is something that so few men who have grown up with it are able and willing to do, especially men of that generation and background. (I will never know what my great grandfather did to my great grandmother and my grandfather. I only ever saw the shadow his alcoholism cast over the family and had to infer his behavior.) Just talking about it in public and telling people the cycle can be broken was incredibly valuable.
Anyway, it is a reminder to live your life in a way that when you die the people who encountered you directly or indirectly all gather to say how much they will miss you, however many or few they may be. (Rather than, say, becoming the person everyone thinks of when the internet says 'why does the Grim Reaper keep taking the wrong octogenarians???')
It's not just that he was the impeccable embodiment of my favorite fictional character of all time and my favourite Starfleet captain and a Lucius Aelius Sejanus who made you understand why Livilla would poison her husband and a fantastic MacBeth and an even better Claudius. It's the funniest guest character in Frasier, his guest spot on The Simpsons, Jeffrey, The Green Room, every single thing he did with Sir Ian, the lobster Halloween costume, the foster dogs. Most of all that he was not only one of the best actors of his extraordinary generation of actors but according to everyone who ever met or worked with him managed to stay a genuinely kind person no matter how famous he became, ever determined to use his old white man powers for good.
Most of all I admired his advocacy against domestic violence. Speaking out against it is something that so few men who have grown up with it are able and willing to do, especially men of that generation and background. (I will never know what my great grandfather did to my great grandmother and my grandfather. I only ever saw the shadow his alcoholism cast over the family and had to infer his behavior.) Just talking about it in public and telling people the cycle can be broken was incredibly valuable.
Anyway, it is a reminder to live your life in a way that when you die the people who encountered you directly or indirectly all gather to say how much they will miss you, however many or few they may be. (Rather than, say, becoming the person everyone thinks of when the internet says 'why does the Grim Reaper keep taking the wrong octogenarians???')
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