Andrew Jack, best known to Star Wars fans for portraying Major, and later General, Caluan Ematt has died today at age 76. According to a report from TMZ they were informed by Jack’s representative, Jill McCullough, that he “passed away Tuesday morning at a hospital outside of London as a result of complications he’d developed from COVID-19.”
While many Star Wars fans know him as Ematt and providing the voice for Moloch in Solo: A Star Wars Story very few were aware that he had worked as a dialect coach in films and theater for over 30 years and that his first big break was with Lucasfilm.
The son of actor Stephen Jack, his first dialect coaching for a major feature film was in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he coached four of the actors on dialects they were required to perform. He worked with Alison Doody and Michael Byrne on their German; Harrison Ford for his scene pretending to be a Scottish lord and Englishman Julian Glover who played American Walter Donovan.
Over the decades Andrew Jack worked with some of Hollywood’s biggest names and franchises. He coached Pierce Brosnan on three of his James Bond films; Robert Downey Jr. in his roles as Charlie Chaplan and Sherlock Holmes and Christian Bale in Batman Begins. He also worked in the Marvel universe on such films as Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War. In what surely is a highlight and testimony to his career, which featured over 80 projects, Andrew Jack served as the Supervising Dialect Coach for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“We were very strict with ourselves.” said Jack in an interview posted on his website. “We followed the rules that Tolkien wrote—the information you can find in the appendices of the book—virtually to the letter. Except that we originally intended that the Orcs would sound more evil without any accent, but then decided that the Orcs should be ‘Cockney’ to bring in a modern sound to what was supposed to be a rural and altogether separate world of accents. Nevertheless, I think we pleased the audience by doing it like this and not dramatically changing a lot by keeping the pronunciation very close to the way Tolkien had originally intended.”
He returned to Lucasfilm for The Force Awakens, working with Daisy Ridley and John Boyega on their accents and then again on The Last Jedi. In Rogue One he coached Alan Tudyk and Ben Mendelsohn as well as Alden Ehrenreich in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Andrew Jack (born Andrew Hutchinson) is survived by his wife Gabrielle Rogers.
For more about Andrew Jack and his career visit his website HERE.
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