Oh, man, the news about Andreas Katsulas was sad, but this is downright depressing: Phil Brown, the actor who played Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen, has also died. He was 89.

Brown led a pretty interesting life, as detailed in a suprisingly lengthy obituary in the Chicago Tribune (surprising given that his fame is entirely due to about five minutes worth of footage in a 30-year-old film). He was one of the many Hollywood artists who found themselves blacklisted during the McCarthyist witchhunts of the 1950s, even though he always denied being a Communist, and he subsequently fled to London so he could continue working. Roughly three decades later, a young filmmaker named George Lucas was shooting Star Wars in London and needed an actor with a decent American accent to play his protagonist’s guardian. The rest is fanboy history.

My feelings about Brown’s best-known character, Tatooine moisture-farmer Owen Lars, have changed substantially over the years. I remember thinking when I was child that he was just an old meanie, always telling Luke to get back to work and not think about doing anything cool with his life. I didn’t even care all that much that the stormtroopers roasted him, because his death gave Luke the freedom to get off that old rock and get to the interesting stuff. When I watch the film these days, however, I see Owen in a much more sympathetic light. He’s gruff with Luke, yes, but I suspect a lot of his manner has to do with the harsh environment in which they live, the difficulty of making a living as a small-time farmer, and the stresses of the mission that was apparently given to him and his wife, Beru, by Obi-Wan Kenobi: watch over the boy, keep him safe.

Does Owen know that his step-brother Anakin became Darth Vader? It’s impossible to say from the scant on-screen evidence we’re given. There is that one line in which he says he’s afraid of Luke being too much like his father, but is that a reference to Vader and Luke’s potential to turn all Darksidey himself, or only to the fact that Anakin’s abilities led him into off-world conflicts and — as far as the general public knows — an early death? I believe it’s probably the latter. There would be no reason for Obi-Wan to tell Owen and Beru all the gory details of what happened to the elder Skywalker, no reason to frighten them about what their ward might do or to make them wonder if a certain heavy-breathing gargoyle will one day turn up on their doorstep. I think Owen has grown to love Luke over the years — his affection for the young man is quite evident in the post-dinner scene between him and Beru, after Luke has left the table — and simply doesn’t want to lose him. As the dialogue suggests, Owen and Beru both know that their time with their “son” is growing short. As an only child myself, I’ve experienced first-hand how reluctant parents of onlies can be to let their grown children go. Owen’s gruffness can be read as a complicated reaction to Luke’s growing independence and Owen’s own irrelevance to the boy’s life, possibly compounded by prejudices against Luke’s Jedi heritage (the Jedi were no doubt thoroughly slandered by the Empire following the events of Episode III) and a sense of obligation to keep Luke on the farm, hidden from the Empire and safe, as long as possible. In short, Owen is mean to Luke because he knows he’s losing him, and bullying is the only tactic Owen’s got left to keep the kid around. This makes it ironic, then, that Luke actually loses Owen and Beru before he leaves Tatooine, as opposed to merely tragic. Although the “burning skeleton” scene is one of the more melodramatic ones in a pretty melodramatic movie, I now find it moving in ways that I never used to.

In short, I’ve grown to like Uncle Owen, and it hurts to learn that the man who gave him cinematic life is now gone. Just one more sign that I’m getting old myself, I guess…