MARTIN LANDAU

(20 June 1928 - 15 July 2017)

The first job that the American actor Martin Landau, who has died at the age of 89, had was as a cartoonist on the New York Daily News. By 1951, however, he was determined to take up acting. His stage debut was in Detective Story in Maine, followed by the Broadway production of First Love. Out of two thousand applicants he, along with Steve McQueen, managed to get into Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. From 1953 Landau appeared in many TV western shows as well as playing John the Baptist in Salome. In 1959 he was in three films, Pork Chop Hill, The Gazebo and North by Northwest, the last from Hitchcock and the film in which Landau made the most impression as Leonard, the ‘friend’ of the villainous James Mason character, who Landau decided should be gay. A lot more television followed until Joseph L. Mankiewicz cast him as Rufio in Cleopatra. Other films included Decision at Midnight, The Hallelujah Trail, The Greatest Story Ever Told  (as Caiaphas), Nevada Smith (with Steve McQueen) and They Call Me Mister Tibbs, among many others. By then Landau had gained popularity as Rollin Hand in the TV series Mission: Impossible (1966-69) and later another series, Space: 1999, kept him busy with his then wife Barbara Bain. Landau rarely stopped working but his better films were Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Oscar-nominated), Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (Oscar-nominated) and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood for which Landau, brilliant as Bela Lugosi, won his only Academy Award. Landau was working right to the end of his life, and there are still two more features of his to come. He and Barbara Bain have two daughters, film producer Susan and actress Juliet.

MICHAEL DARVELL