Kenneth Colley, the British actor who appeared in seven features for director Ken Russell and portrayed the Darth Vader underling Admiral Piett in the Star Wars films The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, has died. He was 87.
Colley died Monday at his Ashford home in Kent, England, of complications from COVID and pneumonia, his agent Julian Owen announced.
For Ken Russell, Colley played dramatist Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, younger brother of the famed composer, in The Music Lovers (1971), and he did six other features with the director: The Devils (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), Mahler (1974), Lisztomania (1975) — as Frédéric Chopin — The Rainbow (1989) and Prisoner of Honor (1991).
In a career that spanned more than 60 years, Colley also enjoyed a fruitful association with Monty Python and its members; he worked 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 played Jesus in Life of Brian (1979).
He had a stutter that he said disappeared whenever he was onstage or in front of a camera.
Colley’s Firmus Piett served as first officer of the flagship Star Dreadnought Executor under Admiral Kendal Ozzel (Michael Sheard) in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), then assumed command of the ship after Ozzel’s death at the hands of Vader.
He wasn’t expected back for Return of the Jedi (1983). “But I got a call from my agent saying there’s been a lot of fan mail about this character and George [Lucas] has decided to put him in the next one, do you want to do it?” he recalled in a 2008 interview. “I said sure, yeah. Who wouldn’t?”
He returned to play Piett once more in the 2012 telefilm Lego Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out.
Born in Manchester on Dec. 7, 1937, Colley began his professional acting career in 1961 and went to perform for the London’s Old Vic, The Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Also in the 1960s, he showed up on episodes of The Avengers, Coronation Street and Emergency-Ward 10 and in such films as How I Won the War (1967) and Oh! What a Lovely War (1968).
Other 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 in the 1985 NBC telefilm Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story; a Nazi in the 1988-89 ABC miniseries War and Remembrance; the pirate Ben Gunn on the 1986 Disney Channel miniseries Return to Treasure Island; and a crime boss on the BBC’s Peaky Blinders in 2016.
Colley’s work as Piett made him a popular figure at Star Wars conventions and events all over the world.
“If you let it, it becomes a way of life,” he said in that 2008 interview. “I think we’re now into the third generation of people, who were not born, and it keeps it alive. For me, the personal experience is a very long time ago, but this kind of secondary experience is going on all of the time. I’ve just signed a picture for someone just a minute ago. I think it may outlive me.”