Alan arkin

Born on March 26, 1934, in Brooklyn, the famous New York neighborhood, Alan Wolf Arkin comes from a family of Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Russia. The actor is the son of David Arkin , a writer persecuted during the Witch Hunt. From the age of ten, the boy began to receive acting classes, but soon stopped studying to form The Babysitters, a folk band. Around this time he co-wrote a song, ‘The Banana Boat Song’, which topped the charts performed by Harry Belafonte . He also got to film his own solo album. Despite everything, Arkin had difficulties to get ahead thanks to music, so he began to think about other paths in life. As a singer, he had appeared performing songs inCalypso Heat Wave , a musical of little interest. He ended up becoming a requested stage actor who was also hired for some television series. He made his debut as a theater director in 1966, on Broadway, with the production of ‘Eh?’, for which he hired a young actor who was quite promising at the time, a certain Dustin Hoffman . Alan Arkin also directed the first theatrical production of ‘The Sunshine Boys’. At this time he married Jeremy Yaffe, with whom he had two children, but ended up leaving her for the actress Barbara Dana , mother of a third child, from whom he would also divorce. The three boys have followed in their father’s footsteps, as Adam, Matthew and Anthony Arkin are dedicated to acting.

Norman Jewison was the first filmmaker to bet on him to star in The Russians Are Coming . In this gentle cold war satire, he played Rozanov, a Russian lieutenant whose submarine crashed off Massachusetts. This will unleash panic because the population fears that it is the beginning of a Soviet invasion. For this work, Arkin earned his first Oscar nomination while his second would come soon after, for The Lonely Hunter at Heart . Arkin did a chilling job playing the psychopath stalking a blind woman ( Audrey Hepburn ) in Alone in the Dark , but he disappointed somewhat with King of Peril, where he played Inspector Clouseau, the character that Peter Sellers had embroidered , in The Pink Panther . Shortly thereafter he rocked his starring role in Trap 22 , an anti-war satire in which he played Captain John Yossarian, who pretended to be crazy to get himself removed from service. Although by the 1970s, Arkin was well positioned, he didn’t quite become a star, because he chose to take part in films that didn’t quite work, except for The In-Laws , a good comedy in which he was a dentist, which sometimes A few days after his daughter’s wedding, his relationship with the groom’s father ( Peter Falk ) gets off to a bad start. In Elementary, Dr. Freudhe played the famous promoter of psychoanalysis, who took Sherlock Holmes as a patient. In the ’80s and ’90s, he ended up specializing in supporting characters. “I have always been better at supporting roles. I have never been a man for a lead actor. That has given me the opportunity to not have to take my clothes off all the time,” jokes the actor. In fact, he intervenes as a luxury guest in appointments such as Eduardo Manoscissorhands , Havana , Illusions of a liar , Firewall and above all Glengarry Glen Ross (Success at any price) , a memorable adaptation of a work by David Mamet , of a choral nature, such as Vidas counted , from 2001.

When he was nominated for an Oscar for the third time, for his work in Little Miss Sunshine , Arkin gave it up as lost, since all the pools proclaimed Eddie Murphy as the favorite . But no one doubts that it is a well-deserved award, since an actor of the level of Alan Arkin was needed to bring out an endearing background to a character who was a drug addict and addicted to pornography, very critical of the rebellious generation that emerged from May 1968.