There’s a particular tug on the heartstrings that follows the dying of an actor who’s been carefully related to a dying scene, as is the case with Bernard Hill, who died Might 5 on the age of 79.
The dying of Juanita Moore in 2013 on the age of 98 got here 54 years after perhaps the final word film deathbed scene — to not point out funeral, with a horse-drawn hearse and Mahalia Jackson eulogizing her in music — in Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life.” And when Carl Weathers died earlier this yr, it got here practically 4 many years after his best-known character, Apollo Creed, had died in “Rocky IV,” prompting your complete “Creed” franchise to spring up in his wake, with him conspicuously, clearly, absent.
A lot reward and remembrance has been given since Hill’s passing to his position as Captain E.J. Smith in James Cameron’s “Titanic.” However Bernard Hill‘s dying scene as Theoden King in “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” has imprinted itself on anybody with even a fleeting curiosity in Twenty first-century blockbuster filmmaking. A counterpoint of heartbreak amid triumph, his hushed utterance to beloved niece Eowyn, “I’m going to my fathers, in whose mighty firm I shall not now really feel ashamed,” is likely one of the nice guy-cry moments of all time.
It’s symbolic of the work he did all through his two movies of the trilogy, “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King.” Work that arguably grounded these films in humanity greater than any of his co-stars. Simply that parting line alone conveys each Valhalla-like grandeur and a bracing intimacy: Unhorsed in battle, his physique damaged, he spends his ultimate breaths in a second of connection along with his niece. In Hill’s arms, you get a way that gazing into the eyes of a liked one is completely the factor Theoden would most need to do in his final moments on this earth.
Sprawling spectacle and deep feeling: Peter Jackson mixed each to legendary impact in his Tolkien diversifications. And Hill embodied them. The primary time we see him as Theoden, he’s on the heart of one of the spectacular visible results moments in your complete trilogy, when, having been rendered particularly wizened and bent by darkish forces at work, he’s immediately youthened by the wizard Gandalf. The make-up work, time-lapse enhancing, and CGI mixed on this second wouldn’t have been practically as highly effective with out Hill’s personal shifting posture and ever-more-alert glances. He made a miracle appear really attainable.
If Tolkien’s meta-narrative in “The Lord of the Rings” is about how humanity got here to inherit the earth over all of the magical individuals who as soon as resided right here as effectively, Hill’s activity as Theoden was to symbolize who everybody else is preventing for. There’s Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn, with one foot within the magical world of the elves and the opposite in humanity, however Theoden is all human. His Viking-like folks, horse lords referred to as the Rohirrim, are noble warriors, to make sure… however we additionally see them as refugees, as victims of struggle. “The Lord of the Rings” isn’t nearly ending wars to protect the garden-like perfection of The Shire; it’s about ensuring everybody has an opportunity to stay. To “breathe the free air once more,” as Gandalf tells Theoden after he actually took many years off his face.
There’s a pure high quality to the Rohirrim that defies the generally twee cutesiness of the hobbits or the magical unearthliness of the elves. They’re the individuals who really carry human stakes to the desk. Which is why when Theoden does go excessive, and Hill intones nice battle cries like, “Now for wrath, now for smash, and a pink daybreak! Forth Eorlingas!” it feels rooted in an actual place. He’s not simply quotable; he’s plausible. We’ve seen Theoden crying over the dying of his son, dreamily staring off into house, questioning, Arthur-like, “How did it come to this?” and cockily pondering that his folks can be unreachable to their enemies in his fortress. By the point he says one thing with as a lot geek grandeur as “the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound within the Deep one final time!” you simply go together with it.
Tom Hoeler, the senior editor of Random Home Worlds (the publishing imprint that reissues all the brand new editions of “The Lord of the Rings” within the U.S.), famous in his personal tribute how “an attractive factor about Bernard Hill and his Theoden portrayal is, that simply may very well be a ‘stiff higher lip, no emotion’ chief we so usually see, saving a sole emotional beat for his final scene with Eowyn as a ‘oh he all the time *did* care’ second. But the story/Hill don’t do this. The story consistently throws moments of emotional vulnerability at him. And Hill embraces these, enjoying these with as a lot vigor, honesty, and dedication as he does the grand speeches/battle cries.”
Earlier than the climactic ultimate battle in “The Return of the King,” Theoden tells Eowyn that the one factor he needs for her is to see her smile once more. It’s heat personified, Hill’s voice someplace between a whisper and a purr, and completely defying any archetypal notion of a warrior king even for a saga that’s all about archetypes. To be archetypal is one factor. To be singular, like Hill, is one other.