Martin Landau
Actor known for roles in North by Northwest, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Mission: Impossible
MARTIN LANDAU, who has died aged 89, was a tall, dark and angular supporting player and one of cinema’s most convincing exponents of saturnine villainy. He was the tormented adulterer in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989); impersonated Bela Lugosi as a gleefully cantankerous egomaniac high on morphine in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994); and at the start of his career gave one of his most memorable performances as James Mason’s sadistic henchman in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959).
Ernest Lehman’s screenplay for North by Northwest had specified that Landau’s character, Leonard, was “unmistakably effeminate”, and the actor decided to ramp up the sexual jealousy.
“I chose to play Leonard as a gay character,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2012. “It was quite a big risk in cinema at the time. 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, played by James Mason. Every one of my friends thought I was crazy, but Hitchcock liked it.” James Mason, however, balked at the implication that his character might be bisexual.
Landau was also a familiar face on television through his appearances as Rollin Hand, the chameleon-like “man of a million faces”, in the first three seasons of the top-rated television series Mission: Impossible, starting in 1966. He co-starred with his wife Barbara Bain, whom he met at an acting class, and the couple went on to headline the fondly remembered British science-fiction series Space: 1999 from 1975 to 1977, with Landau as the nylon tunic-clad Commander John Koenig.
Martin Landau was born in Brooklyn on June 20 1928, the son of Morris Landau, an Austrian machinist, and his wife Selma (née Buchanan). After attending James Madison High School and the Pratt Institute, at the age of 17 he took a job as an illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist on the New York Daily News. But he had a flair for mimicry and had always hankered after an acting career, so at 22 he decided to make a move.
In 1955 he auditioned for the Actors’ Studio, the centre of Method acting run by Lee Strasberg. Only two actors were accepted: Landau and Steve Mcqueen. He took some classes with Marilyn Monroe and the pair were briefly close. “It was an interesting relationship,” he recalled. “She was incredibly attractive but very difficult.” Another good friend was James Dean.
Landau remained a member of the Actors’ Studio and later taught the likes of Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton. He went into television, turning up in many of the live drama slots of the period such as Studio One, Kraft Theater and Playhouse 90.
In 1959 he made his first two films, Pork Chop Hill, a rugged Korean War movie starring Gregory Peck, and Hitchcock’s viscerally exciting North by Northwest. The director had cast Landau after seeing him in Paddy Chayevsky’s play Middle of the Night.
He established himself as reliable, with a quality of enigmatic reserve that came to the fore in roles such as General Rufio in Cleopatra (1963) and Caiaphas in George Stevens’s New Testament epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). But it was Mission: Impossible, a hokey confection about a team of secret agents battling evil, that made his name.
His subsequent film output through the 1970s and 1980s was uneven, and ranged from Westerns such as The Hallelujah Trail (1965) and Nevada Smith (with Steve Mcqueen, 1966), to quickly forgotten thrillers such as They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970, a sequel to In the Heat of the Night), disaster movies (Meteor, 1970) and sciencefiction chillers (Without Warning, 1980). The parts were not infrequently onedimensional, and he later observed: “I’ve done an awful lot of skinny roles.”
But his fortunes turned when in 1988 he was cast as the wheeler-dealer Abe Karatz in Tucker, Francis Ford Coppola’s film about a visionary car maker. The film brought Landau his first Oscar nomination and heralded a late flowering in his career.
Then came the meaty roles of Judah, the ophthalmologist drawn into evil in Crimes and Misdemeanors (with another Oscar nomination), and of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (for which he finally won the Academy Award, for best supporting actor).
Among his later films were Sliver (1993), The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996 – as Geppetto), The X-files (1998), Sleepy Hollow (1999) and The Majestic (2001). For television he played the mafioso Joseph Bonanno in Bonanno: a Godfather’s Story (1999), and in The Anna Nicole Story (2013) he was the octogenarian tycoon who marries a Playboy model.
In 2012 he again worked with the director Tim Burton, providing the voice of the eccentric teacher Mr Rzykruski in Frankenweenie (2012), and his final film was the role of a retired doctor in The Last Poker Game (2017).
Martin Landau married Barbara Bain in 1957; the marriage was dissolved in 1993. He is survived by his two daughters.
Martin Landau, born June 20 1928, died July 15 2017