Ian McDiarmid on George Lucas Hiring Him

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Known to hundreds of millions of Star Wars fans as the scabby and nefarious Emperor Palpatine, Scottish actor Ian McDiarmid also happens to have built a career as one of the theatre's most acclaimed and influential figures. This year McDiarmid won the Tony award for best actor on Broadway for his astonishing performance in Faith Healer. McDiarmids movie breakthrough occurred when he was cast as the Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi (1983). The makeup used to age him to play a 100-year-old Emperor in Return of the Jedi made him quite unrecognizable, but the real McDiarmid could be seen in The Phantom Menace. Taking on two personas, both Senator Palpatine and his evil alter ego Darth Sidious, McDiarmid turned in a sinuously evil performance in the second prequel Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). But it was in the third and final installment, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) that McDiarmid offered one of the most compelling performances of the entire trilogy and filled the screen with a palpable menace that no CGI creation could equal. McDiarmid stared in Gorky Park (1983), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), and Time Burtons Sleepy Hollow (1999).