Anton Yelchin obituary (original) (raw)

Anton Yelchin, who has died aged 27 in a freak car accident at his home in Studio City, Los Angeles, displayed subtlety, versatility and intelligence across the spectrum of genres covered in his prolific film career.

The perky, fresh-faced actor was most widely known for his sweetly comic turns in the 2009 film Star Trek and its 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. The director JJ Abrams took that franchise back to the drawing board after it had been run into the ground over nearly 30 years of increasingly moribund instalments. Much of the new-found zest was attributable to a knowing and youthful ensemble cast, which included Yelchin as Pavel Chekov, the animated young navigator of the USS Enterprise, a role originated on television by Walter Koenig. Yelchin will appear posthumously in a third outing, Star Trek Beyond, which is released next month.

He was born in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) to Irina Korina and Viktor Yelchin, figure skaters who had been stars of the Leningrad Ice Ballet. After his parents attained refugee status when he was six months old, they moved with him to the US, with his maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother. Anton was educated at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in Los Angeles, and later studied film at the University of Southern California, but early success in acting precluded a conventional upbringing.

After he failed to show prowess at skating, his parents enrolled him in acting classes at nine years old. He quickly landed roles in television and film. Notable early TV appearances included ER, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the alien abduction series Taken, which counted Steven Spielberg among its executive producers.

Yelchin made his first splash on film at the age of 11 in Hearts in Atlantis (2001), adapted from a Stephen King story, in which he played a young boy who befriends a neighbour (Anthony Hopkins) with mysterious powers. At 14, he started a two-year stint on the TV series Huff as the prematurely wise son of a psychiatrist (Hank Azaria) who is undergoing a midlife crisis.

Following the end of Huff, Yelchin concentrated almost exclusively on film. He played a real-life kidnap victim in Alpha Dog (2006) and provided valuable moments of warmth in a film populated largely by strutting, goggle-eyed method actors. His considerable charisma fuelled the teen comedy Charlie Bartlett (2007), in which he played the title character – a privileged student who becomes an unofficial guru to his new classmates in the US public school system.

After the success of Star Trek, he appeared in another revamped sci-fi property, Terminator: Salvation (2009). The film was savaged by critics, and its release was overshadowed by a leaked recording of its star, Christian Bale, throwing a tantrum during shooting – but Yelchin proved that he could be a reliable point of human interest for audiences in even the most impersonal blockbuster.

In Charlie Bartlett (2007). Photograph: Alamy

His talents were put to far better use in the sort of small-scale or offbeat projects that led to one website declaring him “Hollywood’s New ‘It’ Geek”. Among these were two dramas released in 2011: The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster, in which he again played the offspring of an adult in crisis (Mel Gibson this time, as a chief executive who communicates via a glove-puppet); and Like Crazy, a raw and mostly improvised love story about a long-distance romance between a young American man (Yelchin) and a British woman (Felicity Jones).

He was likeable as a boy who discovers his neighbour is a vampire in the remake of Fright Night (also 2011) – and he stayed in the realm of quirky horror as a clairvoyant cook battling evil in Odd Thomas (2013), along with Jim Jarmusch’s arthouse vampire oddity Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), co-starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston; and Joe Dante’s zombie comedy Burying the Ex (2014).

Though Yelchin was happy to work in Hollywood, he was under no illusions about its shortcomings. “There’s only a handful of people I trust completely, and I know who they are,” he said in 2011. “Other than that, I pretty much don’t trust people. The film industry itself – the ‘industry’ and business side of it – just sucks and is really demoralising, so it’s added to my general paranoia.”

Perhaps it was for that reason that, Star Trek aside, he restricted himself mostly to pictures that would increase his range rather than his box-office standing. He was seen most recently in the thriller Green Room (2015) as a punk rocker threatened by white supremacists after witnessing a murder. Films still to be released include the intimate romance Porto and the sci-fi drama Rememory.

He is survived by his parents.