Oscar-winning actor had ups and downs
MARTIN LANDAU
Martin Landau, an Oscarwinning character actor whose dagger-like physique, Cheshire-cat grin and intense gaze made him ideally suited to play icy villains and enigmatic heroes, notably the disguise master Rollin Hand on the hit 1960s TV series “Mission: Impossible,” died Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 89.
Dick Guttman, a publicist for Landau, told The Associated Press that the actor died of “unexpected complications.”
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.”
Hitchcock, an early admirer, cast Landau in his most memorable early role, as espionage ringleader James Mason’s closeted gay minion Leonard in “North by Northwest” (1959). 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 London’s 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 fullfledged 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 Barbara Bain, at the time Landau’s wife, as the sultry team member Cinnamon Carter. Landau and Bain left the show — he quit in a salary dispute, and she was fired in retaliation — after three years into the show at the peak of their fame.
Landau said he found himself adrift, reduced to playing heavies in low-budget dreck. A widely acknowledged nadir was the TV film “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island” (1981).
His career was salvaged by Coppola, who cast him as an amiable elderly businessman with a huckster streak in “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (1988). He received a supporting Oscar nomination for his touching and understated performance — the start of an acting renaissance in his 60s.
A second Oscar nomination followed for Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989), in which Landau brought a sympathetic twist to a New York ophthalmologist and philanthropist who is also an embezzler and arranges to have his erratic mistress (Anjelica Huston) killed.
He received the Academy Award for Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994), in which he had an impassioned supporting turn as the Hungarian-born, heroin-addicted, aging horror-film actor Bela Lugosi. Critics lauded the tragicomic poignancy Landau brought to the role of a once-big star reduced to appearing in movies directed by the bizarrely inept Wood, often labeled the worst director of all time.
A highlight of his final years was his Emmy Awardnominated recurring role on the HBO comedy series “Entourage” as a washed-up Hollywood producer.