This has not been a good day for tall men in thick glasses. Just hours after the death of George A. Romero was announced, the news broke that Oscar-winning actor Martin Landau had died in hospital in Los Angeles. He was 89.
Landau – who was hired at age 17 as a cartoonist at the New York Daily News, a resume tidbit that never ceases to delight me – had an acting career that stretched over six decades, moving back and forth between film and television as the opportunities allowed. He had the goods: Landau was the other guy accepted to Lee Strasberg’s legendary Actor’s Studio alongside Steve McQueen in 1955 it was there that he met his future wife and co-star, Barbara Bain.
His intense gaze and angular features made him too interesting to be a conventional leading man, so he became the consummate character actor, starting with a high-profile role as James Mason’s henchman Leonard in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 caper thriller North By Northwest – a part he invested with a seething, barely suppressed queerness.
He’d done some television before, and shot a small part in Lewis Milestone’s Korean War picture Pork Chop Hill, but the Hitchcock film made people take notice after that, he booked gig after gig. On the big screen, he appeared in epics like Cleopatra, The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Hallelujah Trail on the small screen, he racked up dozens of credits in Westerns – he looked good as a gunman – but something about him lent itself to larger-than-life characters as well.
He appeared on episodes of The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, on spy comedies like The Wild, Wild West and I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and spent three seasons on ABC’s hit espionage series Mission: Impossible as master of disguise Rollin Hand alongside Bain, who played Cinnamon Carter. Landau had famously passed on the role of Star Trek’s Mister Spock in the same year.
Landau and Bain left the show in 1969, working together again in the cult English sci-fi series Space: 1999 in the mid-70s. (Their marriage ended in 1993 one of their daughters, Juliet Landau, went on to her own cult fame as Drusilla on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.)
After Space: 1999 ended, Landau went into a decade-long slump, making cheesy TV-movies and low-rent horror efforts like Without Warning, Alone In The Dark and The Being. He gave them his all, but they were not distinguished productions by the mid-80s, he was a special guest star in feeble attempts to relaunch Kung-Fu and The Six Million Dollar Man, and that seemed to be where he’d stay for the rest of his career.
Things turned around in a big way in 1988, when Francis Ford Coppola cast Landau as the world-weary mentor of Jeff Bridges’s automotive entrepreneur Preston Tucker in Tucker: The Man And His Dream. The comeback role led to Landau’s first Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, though he lost to Kevin Kline’s knockout comic turn in A Fish Called Wanda.
A year later, Landau was nominated again for Woody Allen’s Crimes And Misdemeanors, where he played a well-to-do ophthalmologist who experiences a moral crisis after he has his mistress killed. It was the performance of his career. He lost that one to Denzel Washington in Glory.
And just like that, Landau was back. He was everywhere again, usually cast as sober authority figures – lawyers, judges, doctors, the President – all the while working his way towards Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.
That was the role that finally won Landau his Oscar in 1994: the foul-mouthed, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in Burton’s cracked biopic. It’s a truism that Oscar loves actors who play other actors, but there was more to Landau’s performance than stunt casting: he imbued the horror has-been with a broken-down misery that vanished only when the cameras were rolling, turning into blazing mania.
Landau was so good he could make you forget he looked nothing at all like the round-faced Lugosi if anything the actor’s height and gaunt features made him a dead ringer for Lugosi’s rival, Boris Karloff. The moment he opened his mouth, you didn’t care.
After Bela, the parts got a little looser. Landau played Halle Berry’s unlikely suitor in B.A.P.S., a new piece in Fox Mulder’s ever-expanding conspiracy theory in the first X-Files movie, an elderly wrestling aficionado in Ready To Rumble. After years of forgettable walk-on parts, writers were tailoring roles for him. He made multiple appearances on Entourage and Without A Trace, turned up as a coroner on the short-lived CSI clone The Evidence, did a voice role on The Simpsons. He seemed to be enjoying himself. That was nice.
Recently, he shot a couple of movies in Toronto: Atom Egoyan’s Remember, which cast him as a Holocaust survivor who sends Christopher Plummer’s dementia-stricken avenger on a mission to hunt down a Nazi war criminal, and Frank D’Angelo’s The Red Maple Leaf, which I have not seen. He’s good in Remember, though the film is ridiculous.
Landau completed at least two more features before his death – The Last Poker Game, a late-life drama which premiered at Tribeca earlier this year, and Without Ward, which the IMDb says is currently in post-production and in which he plays the role of Ward. The film will be released without him. There’s a weird poetry in that, somehow.
