Alien (film) caused an usher to faint. In the following scene, Ash's head is placed on a table and re-activated; for portions of this scene, an animatronic head was made using a face cast of the actor, Ian Holm. However, the latex of the head shrank while curing and the result was not entirely convincing. For the bulk of the scene, Holm knelt under the table with his head coming up through a hole. Milk, caviar, pasta, fiber optics, and glass marbles were combined to form the android's innards. Giger made several conceptual paintings of the adult Alien before settling on the
Ian Holm appeared with Kenneth Branagh in "Henry V" (1989) and as Polonius to Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" (1990). Holm was reunited with Kenneth Branagh in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994), playing the father of Branagh's Victor Frankenstein. Holm raised his profile in 1997 with two prominent roles, as the stressed but gentle priest Vito Cornelius in "The Fifth Element" and the tormented plaintiff's lawyer in "The Sweet Hereafter". In 2001 he starred in "From Hell" as the physician Sir William Withey Gull. The same year he appeared as Bilbo Baggins in the blockbuster film "", having previously played Bilbo's nephew Frodo Baggins in