I just realized that Lord Cutler from Pirates 2 and 3 is Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice!!!! Lol, just had to say that..
Everyone else hated Cutler in Pirates, but I LOVED him and thought he was a great actor even though he was the bad guy. I can't believe he was Mr. Collins from P&P, because I hated him there. I can't believe the same person played the cruel Cutler and the bumbling Collins.
He's definitely a great actor!! :)
That is indeed a remarkable achievement!
Compare to Keira Knightley who also is in both films, and, in both cases, in more important roles.
Everybody knows that and, yet, no one will even remark on it, because she is *just* a star doing her starry thing - being gorgeously beautiful and more than adequate (but NOT more than adequate) on the acting side. Good work, but nothing to write home about, and nothing especially memorable. At no time are we fooled by appearances: when Ms. Knightley is there what we see is not the characters played by Ms. Knightley, but Ms. Knightley playing the characters.
Hollander, on the other hand, creates completely different personalities for his characters of Beckett and Collins (equally repulsive men, but for utterly different reasons), and succeeds so brilliantly in playing with appearances that he makes us forget, or not realize, that, behind those contrasting masks lies the face of the same actor. And when we finally realize it's the same man, that realization comes as a pleasurable surprises, as we see the act of acting in all of its glory, in one great actor's performance and a comparison of two of his finest performances.
See also : GOSFORD PARK, BEDROOM AND HALLWAYS, THE LOST PRINCE, etc.