Jack Purvis
Jack Purvis is an actor, born 1937.
Jack Purvis was a British actor with dwarfism, four feet two inches tall, and the shape of his career was set by that fact: he was cast for stature rather than for range, and he made more of the arrangement than the arrangement deserved.
He appears in all three original Star Wars films as a different creature each time, the Jawa chief in the first, the chief Ugnaught on Cloud City in the second, the Ewok Teebo in the third. Nobody else did that. His other constant was Terry Gilliam. He is Wally in Time Bandits, the thief with the loudest opinions and the worst instincts, then Dr. Chapman in Brazil and a double role in the famously troubled Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Gilliam clearly liked what he could do inside a costume that hides almost everything an actor normally uses.
He also turns up in The Dark Crystal, Willow and Mona Lisa, and played Golg in the BBC's Chronicles of Narnia. A car accident several years before his death left him quadriplegic, and he died in 1997 at sixty. The filmography is short, but the three-films-three-species run means he is somewhere in more people's childhoods than most leading actors ever manage.
Movies (11)
TV (1)
Where to start with Jack Purvis
Time Bandits is the only sensible place to start, and it happens to be one of the best fantasy films anyone made in the 1980s: Purvis has real lines, real comic timing and a character rather than a mask.
After that the Gilliam run continues with Brazil, where he is buried inside a bureaucratic nightmare, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, worth seeing for the sheer scale of its ambition even when the film wobbles. The Star Wars trilogy is the other track: Star Wars hides him under a Jawa hood, The Empire Strikes Back puts him in charge of the Ugnaughts, and Return of the Jedi makes him an Ewok. Watching all three in a row as a spot-the-actor exercise is more fun than it has any right to be. The Dark Crystal rounds out the full run of British creature work from that decade.