Oscar-winning ‘Mission: Impossible’ star Landau dies
MARTIN Landau, an Oscarwinning character actor whose dagger-like physique, Cheshirecat grin and intense gaze made him ideally suited to play icy villains and enigmatic heroes, notably disguise master Rollin Hand on the hit 1960s TV series Mission: Impossible, died July 15 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 89.
In a statement, Dick Guttman, a publicist for Mr. Landau, said that the actor died of “unexpected complications,” but did not provide additional details.
Landau’s seven-decade career featured verdant artistic peaks — including his work for directors Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Tim Burton — and long stretches of arid desert.
The New Yorker once described him as “a survivor of B-movie hell,” noting his long midcareer run of disaster films, blaxploitation movies and fright flicks. “None of them were porno,” the actor once quipped, “though some were worse.”
Landau had proposed making Leonard covertly gay and worked with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to craft a line about his “woman’s intuition” — to be delivered before the character demonstrates how Mason’s girlfriend (played by Eva Marie Saint) has betrayed them.
“It was quite a big risk in cinema at the time,” Landau told the London Daily Telegraph in 2012. “My logic was simply that he wanted to get rid of Eva Marie Saint with such a vengeance, so it made sense for him to be in love with his boss, Vandamm . . . Every one of my friends thought I was crazy, but Hitchcock liked it.”
Landau became a full-fledged star in 1966 with Mission: Impossible, the CBS spy drama about an elite squad of government agents who infiltrate and destroy Cold War enemies. The cast included Steven Hill and later Peter Graves as the group’s boss and Barbara Bain, then Landau’s wife, as the sultry team member Cinnamon Carter. Lalo Schifrin’s pulse-quickening jazzy score — and the self-destructing instructions that set every episode in motion — helped make the show a popular success.
Landau and his wife left the show — he quit in a salary dispute and she was fired in retaliation — three years into the show, at the peak of their fame. ‘Mission: Impossible’ ran another four years without them.