The veteran Hollywood actor Martin Landau has died at the age of 89, his publicist said yesterday.
Born into a Jewish family in New York, the actor died on Saturday from unexpected complications during a hospital stay in Los Angeles, according to a statement issued by Dick Guttman.
His career ranged from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest via a starring role in the TV series Mission: Impossible to Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood, for which he won an Oscar for his poignant portrayal of the ageing horror movie star Bela Lugosi.
Mission: Impossible, which also starred Landau’s wife, Barbara Bain, became an immediate hit upon its debut in 1966. It remained on the air until 1973, but Landau and Bain left at the end of the show’s third season over a financial dispute with the producers.
They starred in the British sci-fi series Space: 1999 from 1975 to 1977.
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Landau had been offered the role of the Vulcan science officer Mr Spock in Star Trek — a part that eventually went to Leonard Nimoy — but turned it down over the character’s lack of emotion.
“A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomised,” he explained in 2001. Instead, he chose Mission: Impossible and Leonard Nimoy went on to everlasting fame as Spock, though ironically took over from Landau on Mission: Impossible after Landau left.
After a brief but impressive Broadway career, Landau made his mark in Hollywood with an eye-catching performance in his second film, playing a villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North By Northwest.
Landau’s career stalled after Mission: Impossible as he found himself typecast in the mould of his character Rollin Hand, the top-secret mission team’s disguise wizard. His film work reached its nadir with an appearance in the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.
However, in 1989 he was Oscar-nominated for his role as a murderous doctor in Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of Woody Allen’s most critically acclaimed films, and by the time he was cast as Bela Lugosi in 1994’s Ed Wood, his career was on the up.
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He portrayed Lugosi during his final years, when the Hungarian-born actor who had become famous as Count Dracula was ill, addicted to drugs and forced to make films with Ed Wood just to pay his bills. A gifted mimic trained in method acting, Landau had thoroughly researched the role.
“I watched about 35 Lugosi movies, including ones that were worse than anything Ed Wood ever made,” he said in 2001. “Despite the trash, he had a certain dignity about him, whatever the role.”
The same could be said about Landau, who made his stage debut in 1951 at a Maine summer theatre in Detective Story and off Broadway in First Love.
In 1955, he was among hundreds who applied to study at the prestigious Actors Studio and one of only two selected. The other was Steve McQueen.
He had two daughters with Barbara Bain, Susan and Juliet. The couple divorced in 1993.