Ian McDiarmid

Ian McDiarmid is a Scottish actor and director born on 11 August 1944 in Carnoustie, Angus, Scotland. His interest in performance began at age five, when his father brought him to a theatre in Dundee to see a comedian named Tommy Morgan. Despite that early fascination, McDiarmid pursued academic study at Queen's College, Dundee, earning a Master of Arts in psychology from what was then a constituent college of the University of St Andrews. He subsequently trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where he received a gold medal for his work in 1968.

McDiarmid made his stage debut in Hamlet in 1972 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974. Over the following decades he appeared in numerous Shakespeare productions, among them The Tempest in 1974 and again in 2000, Much Ado About Nothing in 1976, Trevor Nunn's 1976 Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice in 1984, and King Lear in 2005. He also played Ivanov in Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the Mermaid Theatre in 1978, and portrayed Harry Hackamore in Sam Shepard's Seduced, a role that required extensive prosthetic makeup including a false beard and elongated fingernails. From 1990 to 2001, McDiarmid and director Jonathan Kent served as artistic directors of the Almeida Theatre in Islington, London, where their tenure drew prominent performers including Glenda Jackson, Claire Bloom, Kevin Spacey, and Ralph Fiennes. During his association with the Almeida, McDiarmid also directed productions including Venice Preserv'd in 1986 and Hippolytus in 1991. In 2002 he received the Almeida Theatre's Critic's Circle Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Teddy in a revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, and he earned an Olivier Award for Best Actor for Insignificance in 1982.

McDiarmid made his Broadway debut in 2006, reprising the role of Teddy in Faith Healer. Directed by Jonathan Kent, the production featured McDiarmid alongside Ralph Fiennes and Cherry Jones. For that performance he received both the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play and a Theatre World Award, both in 2006. In 2012 he played the title role in Timon of Athens at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, running from April through June of that year.

On screen, McDiarmid is widely recognized for his portrayal of Palpatine in the Star Wars franchise. He was cast by George Lucas in Return of the Jedi in 1983, and it was his prosthetic work in Seduced that had convinced Lucas and director Richard Marquand he could credibly portray a much older character. After a minor role in Dragonslayer in 1981, his performance as the Emperor in Return of the Jedi established the character. Sixteen years later he reprised the role across the prequel trilogy — The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith — playing both Palpatine's public persona and his Sith alter ego Darth Sidious. In the 2004 re-release of The Empire Strikes Back, a previously existing scene was updated to include McDiarmid, replacing the original portrayal. He returned to the role in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019 and appeared as Darth Sidious in the 2022 television series Obi-Wan Kenobi through a combination of new scenes and archive material from the prequel trilogy. He also voiced the character in Star Wars: The Bad Batch and in video game adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Beyond Star Wars, McDiarmid's film work includes Gorky Park in 1983, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in 1988, Restoration in 1995, Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and The Lost City of Z in 2016. His television credits span several decades and include a role as a killer in The Professionals, the character Hugo DeVries in an episode of Inspector Morse in 1990, Ronald Hinks in Touching Evil in 1997, the detective Porfiry Petrovich in the BBC's 2002 adaptation of Crime and Punishment, and Edward Hyde in the BBC series Charles II: The Power and The Passion in 2003. In 2014 he played British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in the BBC drama 37 Days, centered on the diplomatic crisis preceding the First World War, and he held a recurring role in series two of Utopia as a character named Anton. In radio, McDiarmid voiced Satan in a 41-part BBC Radio 4 dramatization of John Milton's Paradise Lost in 2005, played the intelligence chief LeClerc in a 2009 BBC Radio adaptation of John le Carré's The Looking Glass War, and appeared as Prospero in a BBC Radio 3 production of The Tempest broadcast in November 2021.