A mission no longer
Oscar-winner Martin Landau dies at 89
Martin Landau, the Oscar-winning veteran who appeared in classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and starred in the Mission: Impossible television series in the 1960s, has died. He was 89. Landau died Saturday at UCLA Medical Center, where he experienced “unexpected complications” during a short hospitalization, his publicist confirmed. He won his Academy Award for his portrayal of washed-up Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
Throughout his prolific career, the tall, lean actor remained enthusiastic about his craft, which saw him inhabit roles that included a master spy, a space commander, former Hollywood heavyweights, the prophet Abraham and a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor. Landau’s dedication was apparent during his tenure as co-artistic director for Actors Studio West with Oscar-nominated director Mark Rydell. He recently starred in the CBS police procedural Without a Trace, playing Jack’s father with Alzheimer’s disease, and HBO’s Entourage, playing bumbling film producer Bob Ryan.
Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Landau began his career as a newspaperman at age 17, working for five years at the New York Daily
News as a staff cartoonist and illustrator while studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After five years at the News, Landau suddenly quit to try his hand at acting.
While living in New York in the 1950s, he hung out with pal James Dean and competed for roles with the likes of Sydney Pollack
and John Cassavetes.
“I would meet them in offices and waiting rooms before readings,” he told The Times.
Shifting to theater, Landau auditioned with 2,000 other actors for Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actors Studio in 1955. Only he and a young Steve McQueen were accepted.
“Steve and I got in the same night,” Landau said in a 2016 interview with The
Times. “Lee Strasberg was gentle with Steve because he was rough with Jimmy [Dean]. Jimmy stopped working at the studio. He didn’t want that to happen to Steve.”
That wasn’t the case for Landau. Strasberg berated him for an hour in front of famed studio members Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Marilyn Monroe and Patricia Neal regarding acting choices he had made in a recent TV production.
He made his film debut in Pork Chop Hill (1959), but few can forget his breakout role as Leonard, the villainous henchman stalking Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s classic thriller North by Northwest (1959).
But Landau became wildly popular for his role as Rollin Hand, the “Man of a Million Faces” sleuth on the 1960s hit series Mission: Impossible, with then-wife Barbara Bain. The actor was not meant to be a regular on the show but became so popular that he went on to receive Emmy nominations for each of the three seasons in which he appeared, and in 1968 won a Golden Globe for male TV star. He quit the show in a contract dispute and went on to costar with Bain in Britain’s short-lived sci-fi drama Space: 1999. The couple had two daughters together – actress and ballerina Juliet Landau and producer Susan Landau – before they divorced in 1993.
Though the small screen provided the kind of the indelible success some actors dream about, Landau said “it was a nightmare too.”
“If a show is a hit, it’s the kiss of death as far as doing anything else is concerned,” he said.
“I’d worked for the giants at the beginning – George Stevens, Hitchcock,” Landau said. “And then it all stopped because I was a television actor.”
TV curse aside, Landau went on to play numerous roles in film, including the wheeler-dealer Abe Karatz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), for which he was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for supporting actor.
The next year, he was lauded for his role as the philandering Judah Rosenthal, the doctor who has his mistress murdered and gets away with it, in Woody Allen’s Crimes
and Misdemeanors (1989). He was nominated for his second consecutive supporting actor Oscar.
“In any age range, there are some limitations in terms of good, good parts,” Landau said in 1992. After the Oscar nods, the “good, good parts” for actors in their late 50s and early 60s came his way. However, many of his paychecks came from cheap, direct-to-video movies and overseas television. Which, coincidentally, was one of the reasons why director Tim Burton wanted him to play morphine-addicted Dracula star Lugosi in 1994’s Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp as the memorably inept, low-budget filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr. (Landau’s daughter Juliet also appeared in the film.)
“It’s weird,” Landau told The Times about Lugosi in 1994. “Tim called me out of the blue. He said, ‘You’ve worked with everybody, you’ve done very good movies with major directors, you’ve done tacky, rotten movies with awful directors. You have a presence and there are a lot of things that coincide [with Bela].’ That’s how he came to me. I was shocked. He said, ‘You popped into my head and I couldn’t get you out.’”
For the role, Landau finally won the supporting actor Oscar and his third Golden Globe Award. During his Oscar speech, he hit the podium and shouted “No!” when the orchestra attempted to truncate his speech. He also received top honors from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics for his performance.
In 2000, Landau, who is of Jewish descent, played Abraham, father of the Israelites, in
In the Beginning, which chronicled the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus. Jacqueline Bisset played his wife, Sarah.
In 2008, he produced and costarred with fellow Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn in the December-December romance Lovely, Still. He did a short stint on ABC’s 2011 series Have a Little Faith playing a beloved rabbi to writer Mitch Albom. In 2015, he costarred with Christopher Plummer in the thriller
Remember, playing an Auschwitz survivor out to take down the man responsible for killing his family.
Landau received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was honored with the Israel Film Festival’s Career Achievement Award in 2013.
Landau is survived by daughters Juliet Landau and Susan Landau Finch.