Space: 1999 star Martin Landau dies at 89
Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his publicist.
Landau starred on the hit CBS suspense drama Mission: Impossible as Rollin Hand, a versatile covert-operations agent, from its debut in 1966 until 1969. After the show’s third season he and Barbara Bain, his wife and co-star, left because of a contractual dispute. But the series had served its purpose. Because Landau’s character was a master of disguise, morphing into a different character every week, casting people began to think of him for a variety of roles, not only the villains he had so often played earlier in his career.
Almost two decades later, after some lean years, Landau enjoyed a career revival in feature films. In Francis Ford Coppola’s
Tucker: The Man And His Dream (1988), he was cast as the title character’s amiable hustler of a business partner, challenging the Big Three automakers in the 1940s. The film brought him an Academy Award nomination. He received another nomination the next year for Woody Allen’s
Crimes And Misdemeanors, in which he played a successful, upstanding ophthalmologist and family man who gets away with the arranged murder of his mistress.
Then, in 1994, he played Lugosi, the faded horror star — now elderly, poor and morphine-addicted — in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Johnny Depp played Wood, the enthusiastic but inept 1950s filmmaker, who befriends and employs Lugosi. Landau’s performance earned him the Oscar and the Golden Globe for best supporting actor, as well as awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Screen Actors Guild. But he never forgot the difficult years. “There was a period when things weren’t coming my way,” he told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1994. “I was doing lousy parts in lousy movies, mindless characters. I was a bad guy by profession, a heavy in a certain kind of tacky movie.”
He was also a serious Actors Studio alumnus who once told an NPR listener that he had never had trouble learning lines because “I think of them as thoughts and ideas” that the character needed to express, not as dialogue.
Martin Landau was born on June 20, 1928, in Brooklyn, the son of Morris Landau, a machinist, and the former Selma Buchanan. He attended James Madison High School and Pratt Institute, and originally planned to be an illustrator.
He worked at The Daily News in New York for five years, illustrating “Pitching Horseshoes”, a column written by impresario Billy Rose, and assisting Gus Edson with the comic strip The Gumps. He eventually quit to pursue a career in the theatre.
His stage debut was in summer 1951 in Detective Story at the Peaks Island Playhouse in Maine. That same year he made his off-Broadway debut in First Love at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. By 1955 he was accomplished enough to be admitted to the Actors Studio in New York. Landau often told interviewers that 2,000 would-be members applied that year, but only two got in: him and Steve McQueen. Landau became close friends with James Dean, a fellow Actors Studio member, and dated Marilyn Monroe. (He later taught at the West Coast Actors Studio, where his students included Jack Nicholson.)
And he found steady work, including a role in a 1957 touring production of Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle Of The Night that starred Edward G. Robinson.
“I didn’t have to drive a cab,” he told The Boston Globe in 1989. “I didn’t have to be a waiter. I never had to work in a laundry.” After leaving Mission: Impossible, he and Bain moved to London, where they starred from 1975-1977 in Space: 1999, a science fiction series in which he played the commander of a lunar colony and she played its chief medical officer. But by 1981 the good parts had grown hard to find for both Landau and Bain; that year, in what he later acknowledged was a low point, they appeared in the TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters On Gilligan’s Island.
After his career rebounded with Tucker and Crimes And Misdemeanors, the meaty roles returned.
He played Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, in the TV movie Max And Helen (1990); Joseph Bonanno in Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story (1999), also a TV movie; and Geppetto in a 1996 live-action film version of The Adventures Of Pinocchio. He returned to the stage in 2003 to play a Jewish baker who unknowingly befriends a Palestinian terrorist in Sixteen Wounded
at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.
In recent years he was seen on TV series including Without A Trace, for which he received two Emmy nominations, and Entourage, for which he received one. (He was also nominated three times for Mission: Impossible, although he never won an Emmy.) In 2015 he appeared in the Entourage movie. Among his last movies were The Last Poker Game, Without Ward
and Nate & Al.
Landau married Bain in 1957. They had two daughters, Susan and Juliet, and divorced in 1993.
He is survived by his daughters Susie Landau Finch and Juliet Landau, and a granddaughter.