Ian McDiarmid

"I first encountered Emperor Palpatine at Elstree Studios in the early 1980s. He was staring back at me from a make-up mirror, larger than life and 50 times as ugly. Yellow contact lenses stung my eyes and afforded little peripheral vision. As I walked onto a vast sound stage that had been transformed into a starship hangar, populated by seemingly endless platoons of gleeming white stormtroopers, the scale of George Lucas's vision hit me. This was space spectacle, a back-drop for a galactic opera of Wagnerian dimension."

- Ian McDiarmid

Ian McDiarmid (born August 11, 1944) portrayed Palpatine in the Star Wars films. He appears in every film of the prequel trilogy, as well as in Return of the Jedi. He did not play Palpatine in the original release of The Empire Strikes Back, but was edited in for the DVD release of the original trilogy. He has the distinction of being one of the few actors from the original trilogy to reprise the role of a Human character in the prequel trilogy.

McDiarmid also worked with George Lucas on Lucas's 1992 television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, in which McDiarmid portrayed Professor Levi in the episode "Paris, October 1916."

Gallery

 * Gallery of Palpatine images