Wallach’s ugly baddies were really very, very good
Eli Wallach, actor: b December 7, 1915; m Anne Jackson, 2d, 1s; d June 24, 2014, aged 98.
‘I’VE played more bandits, thieves, warlords, molesters and mafioso than you could shake a stick at,’’ said actor Eli Wallach.
His malevolent, but somehow likeable, Mexican bandits leered at cinema audiences in the westerns The Magnificent Seven and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
Wallach, with his swarthy complexion, twitching brows and calculating eyes, spelt trouble for a gallery of Hollywood heroes from Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner to James Stewart.
His consummate villainy in the Wild West gave him the largesse to pursue his passion for theatre. He even turned down the role of Maggio in the 1953 hit From Here to Eternity so as to appear on Broadway in a Tennessee Williams play.
He had easily outperformed Frank Sinatra in the screen test. Director Fred Zinnemann wanted Wallach for the role and the singer knew it. Sinatra won an Oscar.
‘‘From then on, Sinatra always greeted me by saying, hello, you crazy actor,’’ said Wallach. ‘‘Movies are a means to an end. I lead a dual life. In the theatre, I’m the little man, or the irritated man, the misunderstood man.’’
After playing a baddie on the big screen, he felt the need to ‘‘cleanse’’ himself by doing something more highbrow. At the same time he relished his murderous, but courtly, cameos.
‘‘I enjoy playing evil people, They’re so highly motivated. Good people, you’ve got to admit, are rather dull.’’
While filming The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), he mystified director Sergio Leone by performing a sketchy sign of the cross. The son of poor Polish Jewish emigre parents, Wallach had picked up the abbreviated gesture watching ItalianAmericans as a child in Brooklyn.
He could see even then that his co-star Eastwood was more than just a rugged face.
‘‘Clint was the tall, silent type. You open up and do all the talking. He smiles and nods and stores it all away in that wonderful calculator of a brain.’’
More westerns with Leone beckoned until the pair fell out. Wallach turned down a role in order to appear in another Leone western, only to be told by the director that the studio had forced him to cast Rod Steiger. Wallach screamed at Leone down the phone: ‘‘I’ll sue you.’’ They never spoke again.
Wallach had already proven himself as a bankable character actor in some of the biggestgrossing films of the 1960s including The Misfits (1961) with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.
Wallach embraced method acting, the technique that sees actors immerse themselves in the thoughts and feelings of their characters. He had befriended Monroe when she turned up at the Stanislavskiinspired Actors’ Studio.
She appreciated his tips, but remarked wryly during the filming, ‘‘the audience is going to find my ass more interesting than Eli’s face’’.
He was a perfect foil for James Stewart in How the West Was Won (1962); Peter O’Toole in Lord Jim (1965) and Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million (1966).
His breakthrough role was as the admiring stranger smitten with a nymph (Carroll Baker) in the steamy Baby Doll (1956). In the Tennessee Williams adaptation, he was at once innocent and knowing. Critics loved his performance, though it was denounced by the Catholic Legion of Decency for ‘‘dwelling on carnal suggestiveness’’.
Wallach was born in Brooklyn into the only Jewish family in an Italian neighbourhood that he later called ‘‘Al Capone’s backyard’’.
He learnt his art in the same New York acting school as Gregory Peck and in 1947 he was a founding member of the Actors’ Studio with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
Wallach honed his method acting in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1951) and Camino Real (1953).
Some thought the technique actors used to immerse themselves in the thoughts and feelings of the characters highly pretentious. Charles Laughton, directing Wallach in Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, warned him: ‘‘No Stanislavski crap from you!’’
While at the Actors’ Studio, he met Anne Jackson, whom he married in 1948. The couple later appeared with their two daughters, Roberta and Katharine, in a 1978 stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Their son Peter is also an actor. All survive him.
Wallach wowed theatre critics in The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco, with Joan Plowright, as one half of a farcical elderly couple.
In Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour he played a deranged political dissident. Having given so much to the theatre, it amused him that his role as Mr Freeze in the 1960s Batman TV series generated more fan mail than all his other roles combined.
He loved appearing in the West End and offstage excelled as the courteous, easily charmed American. This composure was broken only once. Wallach was in a London television studio when news of President John Kennedy’s assassination broke in 1963.
A drunk deputy Labour leader George Brown was ushered in to pay tribute. Deeply emotional, Wallach challenged the slurring Brown to ‘‘step outside’’. The pair had to be separated.
He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2011 after his final role the previous year as a shady money man in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
He never retired. ‘‘I tell journalists, ‘please don’t put my age in’. It’s a handicap for directors who think I can’t remember lines.’’