[1][2] Holm won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance as Lenny in the Harold Pinter play The Homecoming.

He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role in the 1998 West End production of King Lear.

For his television roles he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for King Lear, and the HBO film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2003).

Other notable films he appeared in include Alien (1979), Brazil (1985), Dreamchild (1985), Henry V (1989), Naked Lunch (1991), The Madness of King George (1994), The Fifth Element (1997), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and The Aviator (2004).

His father was a psychiatrist who worked as the superintendent of the West Ham Corporation Mental Hospital and was one of the pioneers of electric shock therapy; his mother was a nurse.

[9] A chance encounter with Henry Baynton, a well-known provincial Shakespearean actor, helped Holm train for admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he secured a place from 1950.

[3][10] His studies were interrupted a year later when he was called up for National Service in the British Army,[10] during which he was posted to Klagenfurt, Austria, and attained the rank of Lance Corporal.

He began in 1954 with minor roles, progressing to Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the fool in King Lear.

[17] In 1967 Holm won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play as Lenny in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter.

Holm appeared in the 1977 television mini-series Jesus of Nazareth as the Sadducee Zerah, and as the villain in March or Die.

[25] Based on the novels by Len Deighton, this tells the story of an intelligence officer (Holm) who finds a security leak at the heart of his network.

[29] Holm raised his profile in 1997 with two prominent roles, as the priest Vito Cornelius in Luc Besson's sci-fi The Fifth Element and the lawyer Mitchell Stephens in The Sweet Hereafter.

[30] Holm was nominated for an Emmy Award twice, for a PBS broadcast of a National Theatre production of King Lear, in 1999; and for a supporting role in the HBO film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells opposite Judi Dench, in 2001.