THE MAGNIFICENT ELI WALLACH
Prolific character actor mourned
Eli Wallach, who won a Tony Award on Broadway and appeared in more than 100 movies, starring opposite Clint Eastwood as a scheming treasure-seeker in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), has died. He was 98.
His death was reported by the New York Times, citing his daughter Katherine.
Wallach’s career as an actor spanned six decades. He made his Broadway debut in 1945 and in his 90s was still acting in movies, including The Holiday (2006) and The Ghost Writer (2010). He and his wife Anne Jackson starred in a Broadway revival of The Flowering Peach in 1994, almost 50 years after they met in a Tennessee Williams play.
Born in New York, he played Italian lovers, Mexican bandits, swarthy Wild West villains and streetsmart bad guys.
He was a nasty Mexican outlaw in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and the likable mechanic Guido in The Misfits (1961), which was the last completed movie of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.
Wallach received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement as an actor in November 2010.
Five years after his Tony-winning role in the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo (1951), he made a splashy arrival in Hollywood. He was cast as a Sicilian cotton-gin owner in Baby Doll (1956), another Williams script.
Wallach’s portrayal earned him the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award as “most promising newcomer” at 40, an honour he happily accepted.
A mere five decades later, he accepted another award, this one from the Neighborhood Playhouse acting school in New York City, where he had been a student in the 1930s.
Kate Winslet, his co-star in The Holiday, presented the award. “He’s always smiling, always chatting, always concentrating, and always telling stories,” she told People magazine, recalling his tale of dancing on screen with Marilyn Monroe.
“I made him tell me that story again and again and again,” she said.
Wallach was born on Dec. 7, 1915, the son of Polish immigrants who lived at the rear of their candy store in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“We were the only Jewish family in our working-class neighbourhood, which was predominantly Italian,” Wallach wrote in his 2005 autobiography.
Violence between rival mafia gangs caused the family to move to a safer neighbourhood in Flatbush.
By then, Wallach was in junior high and had absorbed the accents and ethnic characteristics he would use to good effect in various roles.
After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in 1932, he attended the University of Texas. An older brother had spotted the bargain $30 tuition fees the Austin school charged out-of-state students.
Adapting to Texas, Wallach sported a silver belt buckle and groomed polo ponies, getting close to the horseflesh that proved so useful to his film career.
He often sniffed at the airs of filmmakers, though at heart he was a movie fan.
After seeing the finished version of The Magnificent Seven, Wallach wished he could have heard the music that was added after the film was shot. “I would have ridden the horse differently,” he said.
Wallach and Jackson had a son, Peter, and two daughters, Roberta and Katherine.
He’s always smiling, always chatting, always concentrating, and always telling stories.