Martin landau

Work, work and more work. The lanky Martin Landau was an actor to whom no one gave anything. Aware of his talent and his possible limitations, he has developed an admirable career, on stage, television and film, with a handful of simply memorable roles.

Martin Landau was born on June 20, 1928 in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, in the United States, into a Jewish family. A tall man, more than one meter ninety tall, as an actor he was destined to stand out as a luxury secondary, but it would be little by little, after a long career where his television stage was very important.

It did not seem his destiny to be an actor, because at the age of 17 he was signed as an illustrator and cartoonist in the New York Daily News. It was not at all a task carried out for a couple of weeks, five years no less dedicated to illustrating the columns of Billy Rose, or collaborating in the comic strip “The Gumps” -we are not aware that there was a Forrest among the Gumps- by Gus Edson . However, his intimate desire was to be an actor, which did not seem like an easy task due to his lanky and gangly appearance. But the fact is that in 1951 he made his stage debut with “Detective Story”, the work by  Sidney Kingsley  that  William Wyler made  into a film that same year with  Kirk Douglas  as the protagonist with the title of  Brigade 21. It was not, of course, in a large theatre, and it was not until 1955 that he managed to be accepted as a student of  Lee Strasberg  at the Actor’s Studio, the same year that another diligent student,  Steve McQueen , had submitted his application to train at such a prestigious institution. Over the years, he too would be a teacher of actors,  Jack Nicholson  and  Anjelica Huston  being among those who would benefit from valuable lessons from him.

The 1950s saw Landau pacing various television shows – Playhouse 90 ,  Studio One ,  Omnibus – and off-Broadway. The thing was to advance little by little step, and in 1957 she already made her debut on Broadway, with “Middle of the Night”, a play by  Paddy Chayefsky . At the end of the decade came a great movie moment, his villain fallen on Mount Rushmore in  With Death on His Heels  (1959), a wonderful opportunity under the orders of the magician of suspense,  Alfred Hitchcock . And, add on and on, he began to play secondary characters, that same year, 1959, in  La cuma de los héroes  and  Un muerto recalcitrant .

Regarding his personal life, in 1957 he married the also actress  Barbara Bain , to whom he remained together until 1993, the year in which they separated. The fruit of the marriage were two daughters, also linked to the world of cinema.

Landau had thus reached a position, work was not lacking. In cinema we saw him in the historical genre – Cleopatra (1963) , the Caiaphas from  The Greatest Story Ever Told  (1965)-, warlike – The Battle of the Whiskey Hills  (1965)-, western – Nevada Smith  (1966)-, while he was in the most popular television series, such as  Mission Impossible ,  Gunsmoke ,  Colombo ,  Super Agent 86 , and even starred in a science fiction one,  Space: 1999 , where he was the charismatic Captain Koenig; perhaps it was the way to make up for the fact that Dr. Spock from the  Star Trek saga, a role that would seem to fit him perfectly, was played by  Leonard Nimoy . At the end of his 70s, he joined the catastrophic genre with  Meteoro  (1979).

I have already commented that Landau’s physique was not ideal to be a star. And in the 80s what could have been a star seemed to decline. Until in 1988 he shone under the orders of  Francis Ford Coppola  in  Tucker, a man and his dream  of him (1988). Just as this film was a hymn to creative idealism and optimism, the actor, who was 60 years old at the time, seemed to live a second youth, his appearance as a wise and experienced man helped him get tasty roles. As a sixty-year-old he was discovered by a good handful of filmmakers. One of them was  Woody Allen , who gave him the leading role in the disturbing  Crimes and Misdemeanors. (1989), a film that masterfully addressed the question of the morality of acts and the conscience that cannot be silenced. In a short time she would be in two films about what has been called “cinema within the cinema”. People from Sunset Boulevard  ( Barry Primus , 1992) was an uneven satire on Hollywood, but where he really shone was playing an  endearing Bela Lugosi  , addicted to drugs but a friend to his friends, in  Ed Wood  (1994), an unmitigated gem of  Tim Burton  who gave the great Landau his only Oscar. His works for Coppola and Allen each achieved nominations, but they did not become a statuette, instead the third time was the charm.

From this moment on he was regularly claimed. Even for the protagonist, in the role of Geppeto, in  Pinocchio. The legend  (1996), a not very brilliant adaptation of the work of the wooden doll that comes to life by  Carlo Collodi , and which even had a sequel. But they were almost always supporting roles, along with very popular actors, in films like  City Hall  (1996),  The X-Files: The Movie  (1998),  Rounders  (1999),  Shiner  (2000),  The Majestic  (2001)… Worker born, he continued to be active until his last days, even if it was not in movies and/or very brilliant roles. Among the last thing he did are  City of Ember (In search of light) (2008), where he appeared somewhat listlessly, and television series such as  Without a Trace  and  The Entourage .