Michael Pennington, who played Death Star Commander Moff Jerjerrod in “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,” died Sunday. He was 82.
Pennington’s death was confirmed by The Telegraph and shared by Star Wars News Net writer Soeren Kamper.
Though he was perhaps not as well known to American audiences, Pennington was a beloved English actor who founded the English Shakespeare Company (ESC). He was celebrated for his stage work, which included roles in “Hamlet,” “The Judge,” and “The Henrys” among many others.
He also portrayed Antony in a 2012 production of “Cleopatra and Antony,” a role he said was a bit of a surprise to land. “I’d thought vaguely that it was time that I was playing the Prospero’s and the Lear’s, although there has been quite a spate of King Lear’s recently,” he told the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2012.
“So Antony wasn’t really on my radar, although more so perhaps than ‘Richard III’ or Benedick in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ which have never really appealed to me. I’d played Antony before in an audio production for the Open University with Lindsay Duncan but I’d always thought of Antony as being very stocky in stature – like Anthony Hopkins who did in fact play the part opposite Judi Dench at the National in the 1980s,” he added. “But it’s been absolutely glorious to do. Once you start to work on one of his plays, Shakespeare fires you off in all directions.”
Though it might surprise those who remember him well from the role, Pennington also expressed regret about his “Jedi” turn. “I look at it now and I think I overact horribly and I can’t even remember the story-line. We all did it for a song but I suppose that it has given we some kind of calling card for movies, he explained in the same interview. “Whenever I come out of the Stage Door after a performance, all people would ask about was ‘Star Wars’.”
As he also explained, founding the ESC was the work he was proudest of. “In retrospect, I’m most struck by the sheer bravura and unlikeliness of it. It’s given me a fund of remarkable stories to dine out on, particularly about some of the scrapes which we got into,” Pennington said. “Yet at the same time we also succeeded in turning a lot of young actors, who might have drifted off elsewhere, into Classical actors. And I see the influence of the ESC everywhere, wherever Shakespeare is done in belt and braces, whenever the productions are irrelevant and joyful.”
Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington was born on June 7, 1943, in Cambridge, England. He attended Trinity College in Cambridge and studied English at Oxford before deciding to immediately try his hand at acting.
“I didn’t train as an actor. I’m one of those Oxbridge upstarts who read English (but not much of it!) at Cambridge in the early 1960s in a generation that included Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre, and thought I could start right away as an actor afterwards, having treated university like a repertory theatre!” he told What’s On Stage in 2003.
Pennington credited his father with introducing him to theatre when he was 11. While speaking to The Stage in 2021, he explained, “My dad took me to see Paul Rogers in Macbeth at the Old Vic. I was hooked immediately. It was like discovering rock’n’roll. Afterwards I wrote a little newsletter on an old Olivetti typewriter as if I’d been sent to review the play.”
He added that his parents realized “early on” that he was serious about theatre, and he earned his breakthrough part as Captain Jack’s Revenge in 1971.
Though he was an English theatre stalwart and legend, Pennington said he considered a career in the United States. “Yes, I did fancy going to the States but I didn’t think I’d have a chance. I didn’t have the contacts. I had a lot of near misses but there was a secret to it that I never discovered,” he told The Stage.
His partner, Prue Skene, died in 2025. Michael Pennington is survived by his son, Mark.
