His solemn features and gravelly tones made Martin Landau the original choice for Mr Spock in Star Trek. But with roles as an immaculately suited villain pursuing Cary Grant across Mount Rushmore in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Cleopatra (1963) under his belt, Landau decided that pointy ears were not the way forward and the role went to Leonard Nimoy.
Mission: Impossible, the TV series in which Landau appeared from 1966 to 1969, seemed like a far more reasonable alternative. His character’s great skill was impersonation and he could pass himself off as a Latin-American or east European dictator without anyone seeming to notice. He was billed as a guest star in the first episode, but his character, Rollin Hand, “man of a million faces”, proved popular and he became a regular on the show. With its urgent theme tune, an animated fuse burning across the opening credits and a fairly rigid format, Mission: Impossible acquired near-iconic status and Tom Cruise is the star of film versions.
The series made Landau one of the biggest TV stars of the 1960s and he had hoped to translate that small-screen success into films, but it did not work out. Instead his career seemed to become something of a mission im- possible in its own right, as he ricocheted from triumph to low-budget dud and back to Oscar-winning success. He wound up back on television in Space: 1999 (1975-77), a science fiction series from Gerry Anderson, the creator of Thunderbirds, yet by the 1980s had been reduced to supporting roles such as in the dire TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island (1981).
Towards the end of that decade Landau’s career was rescued by Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him as Abe Karatz, a dubious entrepreneur in Tucker: The Man and his Dream (1988), and Woody Allen, who gave him the role of Judah Rosenthal, an adulterous husband who conspires to murder his ex-lover, in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Both earned him Oscar nominations for best supporting actor and he finally won one, as well as virtually every critics’ award going, for his performance as the horror star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994).
Landau, who starred with Johnny Depp, did a superb job in taking on the mannerisms and mindset of a star who was widely regarded as a talented actor, but never really emerged from the shadow of his greatest role, Dracula. Possibly it was a poignant reminder of Landau’s career. “For ten years I was playing mindless villains in stupid movies,” he said soon after receiving his Oscar. In a note of defiance he added: “But I was acting. I wasn’t driving a taxi or waiting on tables. It almost takes a miracle to resurrect your career — but you have to believe that miracles are possible.”
Advertisement
Martin Landau, known in the industry as Marty, was born into a working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, probably in 1928, although sources suggest dates between then and 1934. His father, Morris, was a machinist and his mother, Selma (née Buchanan), took him to movies and the theatre. A “sensitive kid”, he was good at sport and had “an imagination”. He started his working life at 17 as a cartoonist and illustrator with the New York Daily News. However, he nurtured an ambition to act and, to his parents’ dismay, began appearing in plays off-Broadway, although for the rest of his life would draw for pleasure.
He met James Dean in the early 1950s at the “organised bedlam” of an open casting call. Val Holley recalls in James Dean: The Biography (1995): “The two friends began spending considerable time together, sitting in Central Park discussing Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, listening to classical music, or riding in tandem on Dean’s motorcycle.” Later they began work on a 16mm film, but Dean was killed in a road accident in 1955.
Landau followed in Dean’s footsteps by attending Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio — he and Steve McQueen were the only two of 2,000 applicants selected in 1955. Strasberg taught “the method”, the technique in which an actor attempts to replicate a character’s feelings, rather than just imagining them. He made his mark on stage in Uncle Vanya (1956) and Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night (1957) and appeared in TV westerns such as Rawhide (1959).
“He crushed Cary Grant’s fingers on Mt Rushmore in North by Northwest
For several months Landau dated Marilyn Monroe, whom he met at the Actors’ Studio, later describing her as “very needy . . . She was incredibly attractive, but very difficult.” Eventually he met Barbara Bain, who had also been at the Actors Studio. “It was hate at first sight,” Bain recalled. Landau, who at the time had shoulder-length hair and a full beard, retorted that she had “looked like an empty-headed model”. They met again at a party and in 1957 were married, although it came to a “natural end” and they were divorced in 1993. He is survived by two daughters, Susan, a film producer, and Juliet, an actress who played the vamp Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer on BBC Two. Later Landau was in a relationship with the actress Gretchen Becker.
Hitchcock had seen Landau in Middle of the Night and cast him as Leonard, James Mason’s right-hand man, in North by Northwest, which remains a textbook example of how Landau brought delicate and provocative shading to characters that might otherwise disappear. At the climax of the film Cary Grant is hanging from his fingertips on Mount Rushmore, clinging to Eva Marie Saint with his other hand, when Landau appears above them. Landau steps forward as if to help, but crushes Grant’s fingers beneath his foot and is shot in the back by a policeman.
Advertisement
Landau had a reputation for being an intense method actor and had carefully worked out his opening scene, which he saw as an emotional arc or “clear progression”. He was playing the role as coldly sadistic and implicitly homosexual, but Hitchcock, who had little time for the egos or pretensions of actors, undermined him by changing the sequence of shots. Mason recalled: “Landau never had a chance for his clear progression.”
In the decade that followed, Landau seemed to be everywhere. He starred in two episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959 and 1964) and The Outer Limits (1963 and 1964). He had supporting roles as Rufio in Cleopatra (1963), Caiaphas in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and with McQueen in Nevada Smith (1966).
When Bain, his co-star, was sacked from Mission: Impossible in 1969 Landau showed his loyalty to her by quitting. His role was taken by Nimoy, who needed a hit after the cancellation of Star Trek (1966-69). Landau appeared as a minister accused of killing a prostitute in They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) and was support to Telly Savalas in A Town Called Bastard (1971). Yet the big starring roles eluded him and he found himself back on TV in Space: 1999, which was conceived as a British version of Star Trek. He played Commander John Koenig, leader of Moonbase Alpha, while Bain was the base doctor.
It was reputedly the most expensive series made for British television at that time and Lew Grade, the head of the ITC production company, insisted on the American stars to beef up the series’s Stateside appeal. However, the show, which looked as if it had been conceived with marionettes in mind, failed to get a US network buyer and was cancelled after two seasons.
Landau’s career stalled and he appeared in obscure horror and sci-fi films, such as The Return (1980) and The Being (1983), later admitting that he wished they could be turned into “guitar picks”. He recalled watching the 1984 Oscars while “having a beer in my underwear, saying, ‘I should be there.’ ” Instead he was coaching actors such as Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, while agents had told him that he was finished. “It was frustrating,” he told The Times in 2012. “I knew what I was able to do, I was at the height of my powers, but no one was giving me the chance.”
Advertisement
His renaissance began with Tucker, followed by Crimes and Misdemeanors. Suddenly he was a star again and he went on to play Geppetto in The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996). Although the film depicted the woodcutter belatedly discovering his family, Landau was adamant that it would not get soppy. “I didn’t want some jolly little sweet Bavarian guy,” he said. There was the film version of The X-Files (1998), Rounders (1998), The Majestic (2001) and the hip TV series Entourage (2006-08).
Always friendly and with plenty to say, Landau would greet interviewers with an outstretched hand and the question: “What are you? A Mission: Impossible or a Space 1999?”
Asked by The Times in 1995 if his career disproved the adage that there are no second acts to American lives, Landau replied with a smile and a baseball analogy: “They stopped three-act plays in the United States, but I haven’t; I’m on my third act. I always felt like a pinch-hitter waiting to be put up to bat. I really felt that if someone pitched that ball over the plate, I’d hit it out of the ballpark. I knew that and believed it totally.”
Martin Landau, actor, was born on June 20, 1928. He died on July 15, 2017, aged 89