All the standard obituaries for Brock Peters, the imposing actor who died yesterday at the age of 78, are emphasizing his role as Tom Robinson in the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird. But for me, he’ll always be the voice of Darth Vader.

Or perhaps I should say, one of the voices of Darth Vader. While everybody knows that James Earl Jones voiced the Dark Lord of the Sith for the Star Wars movies, it is a somewhat more obscure fact that Peters spoke from the helmet in the Star Wars Radio Drama that was produced by NPR in the early ’80s. If you’ve never heard that program, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. You wouldn’t think an old-fashioned radio show adapted from such a visually oriented film could work, but it does, and I think it works rather brilliantly. Written by the late Brian Daley, the radio show downplays the more spectacular scenes from the movie, which of course could not be fully reproduced in an audio-only medium, and concentrates instead on filling in details about the settings, situations, and characters. The radio show, along with Daley’s trilogy of novels about Han Solo, was the beginning of what SW fans have come to know as the “Expanded Universe” — the tapestry of novels, comics, video games and other materials that have fleshed out Star Wars far beyond what we’ve seen on-screen. And even though there will always be arguments among the fans about which parts of the EU qualify as “canon,” Uncle George himself has accepted elements of the radio drama as “official.” (I’m thinking in particular of the name of the Alderaanian transport, seen in both the original Star Wars and Revenge of the Sith. You had to be sharp to catch it, but in ROTS, Bail Organa refers to the ship as the Tantive [pronounced Tan-ta-vee]. That comes from the radio show, in which the ship was called the Tantive IV.)

Brock Peters’ take on Darth Vader in the radio drama is quite different from James Earl Jones’ movie performance. Jones played Vader with a sort of detached menace and a trace of wry humor — I’ve always thought his reading of the line about Admiral Motti‘s lack of faith is pretty funny, for instance. Peters, on the other hand, fills the Emperor’s Apprentice with a barely-contained rage that threatens to explode at any moment. I suspect he chose this approach to compensate for the limitations of radio. While Jones knew that Vader’s costume and helmet would provide much of the character’s impact, Peters had to somehow make the character intimidating with his voice alone, and he definitely succeeded. The scene in which Vader tortures Princess Leia to learn the location of the rebel base is especially uncomfortable, and not just because she was later revealed to be his own daughter. It’s a great performance in a work that is every bit as meaningful to me as the movie it was adapted from.

In addition to his place in Star Wars lore, Peters also contributed to the Star Trek franchise. He appeared in two of the six feature films that starred the cast of the original series, playing the same character both times, and he had a recurring role on Deep Space Nine as Joseph Sisko, father of the heroic Captain Sisko. In fact, his role as Joseph was so indelible that I had completely forgotten he played Admiral Cartwright in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, at least until I read a Trek-oriented obit this morning. But even when he was playing kindly old Grampa Sisko, stirring up a pot of gumbo for his son Ben and grandson Jake in the family restaurant in 24th Century New Orleans, I only had to close my eyes to see the gargoylish mask of a fallen Jedi…