Eli Wallach, who was one of his generation\u2019s most prominent and prolific character actors in film, onstage and on television for more than 60 years, died on Tuesday. He was 98.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his daughter Katherine.<\/p>\n
A self-styled journeyman actor, the versatile Mr. Wallach appeared in scores of roles, often with his wife, Anne Jackson. No matter the part, he always seemed at ease and in control, whether playing a Mexican bandit in the 1960 western \u201cThe Magnificent Seven,\u201d a bumbling clerk in Ionesco\u2019s allegorical play \u201cRhinoceros,\u201d a henpecked French general in Jean Anouilh\u2019s \u201cWaltz of the Toreadors,\u201d Clark Gable\u2019s sidekick in \u201cThe Misfits\u201d or a Mafia don in \u201cThe Godfather: Part III.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite his many years of film work, some of it critically acclaimed, Mr. Wallach was never nominated for an Academy Award. But in November 2010, less than a month before his 95th birthday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an honorary Oscar, saluting him as \u201cthe quintessential chameleon, effortlessly inhabiting a wide range of characters, while putting his inimitable stamp on every role.\u201d<\/p>\n
His first love was the stage. Mr. Wallach and Ms. Jackson became one of the best-known acting couples in the American theater. But films, even less than stellar ones, helped pay the bills. \u201cFor actors, movies are a means to an end,\u201d Mr. Wallach said in an interview with The New York Times in 1973. \u201cI go and get on a horse in Spain for 10 weeks, and I have enough cushion to come back and do a play.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Wallach, who as a boy was one of the few Jewish children in his mostly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, made both his stage and screen breakthroughs playing Italians. In 1951, six years after his Broadway debut in a play called \u201cSkydrift,\u201d he was cast opposite Maureen Stapleton in Tennessee Williams\u2019s \u201cThe Rose Tattoo,\u201d playing Alvaro Mangiacavallo, a truck driver who woos and wins Serafina Delle Rose, a Sicilian widow living on the Gulf Coast. Both Ms. Stapleton and Mr. Wallach won Tony Awards for their work in the play.<\/p>\n
The first movie in which Mr. Wallach acted was also written by Williams: \u201cBaby Doll\u201d (1956), the playwright\u2019s screen adaptation of his \u201c27 Wagons Full of Cotton.\u201d Mr. Wallach played Silva Vacarro, a Sicilian \u00e9migr\u00e9 and the owner of a cotton gin that he believes has been torched. Karl Malden and Carroll Baker also starred.<\/p>\n
Mr. Wallach never stayed away from the theater for long. After \u201cThe Rose Tattoo\u201d he appeared in another Williams play, \u201cCamino Real\u201d (1953), wandering a fantasy world as a young man named Kilroy. He also played opposite Julie Harris in Anouilh\u2019s \u201cMademoiselle Colombe\u201d (1954), about a young woman who chooses a life in the theater over life with her dour husband, and in 1958 he appeared with Joan Plowright in \u201cThe Chairs,\u201d Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco\u2019s farcical portrait of an elderly couple\u2019s garrulous farewell to life.<\/p>\n
In another Ionesco allegory, a 1961 production of \u201cRhinoceros,\u201d Mr. Wallach gave a low-key performance as a nondescript clerk in a city where people are being transformed into rhinoceroses. The cast also included Ms. Jackson and Zero Mostel.<\/p>\n
By the time \u201cRhinoceros\u201d came along, Ms. Jackson and Mr. Wallach had been married for 13 years. They met in 1946 in an Equity Library Theater production of Williams\u2019s \u201cThis Property Is Condemned\u201d and were married two years later. A list of survivors was incomplete.<\/p>\n
Eli Wallach was born on Dec. 7, 1915, the son of Abraham Wallach and the former Bertha Schorr. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and attended the University of Texas at Austin (\u201cbecause the tuition was $30 a year,\u201d he once said), where he also learned to ride horses \u2014 a skill he would put to good use in westerns. After graduation he returned to New York and earned a master\u2019s degree in education at City College, with the intention of becoming a teacher like his brother and two sisters.<\/p>\n
Instead, he studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse until World War II put him in the Army. He served five years in the Medical Corps, rising to captain. After the war he became a founding member of the Actors Studio and studied method acting with Lee Strasberg. Ahead lay his Broadway debut in \u201cSkydrift,\u201d which had a one-week run in 1945, and his fateful meeting with an actress named Anne Jackson.<\/p>\n
The Wallachs went on to become stalwarts of the American stage, evoking memories of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, thanks to their work in comedies like \u201cThe Typists\u201d and \u201cThe Tiger,\u201d a 1963 double bill by Murray Schisgal, and a revival of Anouilh\u2019s \u201cWaltz of the Toreadors\u201d (1973).<\/p>\n
In a joint interview in The Hartford Courant in 2000, Mr. Wallach and Ms. Jackson said they had sought out opportunities to work together. \u201cBut we\u2019re not the couple we play onstage,\u201d Ms. Jackson said. \u201cFor us, it\u2019s fun to separate the two.\u201d<\/p>\n
The couple appeared in a revival of \u201cThe Diary of Anne Frank\u201d in 1978, in a production that also featured their daughters Roberta as Anne Frank and Katherine as her onstage sister. In 1984, they presided over a chaotic Moscow household in a Russian comedy, Viktor Rozov\u2019s \u201cNest of the Wood Grouse,\u201d directed by Joseph Papp at the Public Theater. Four years later, they returned to the Public as a flamboyant acting couple in a revival of Hy Kraft\u2019s \u201cCafe Crown,\u201d a portrait of the Yiddish theater scene in its heyday.<\/p>\n
In 1993, they presented a theatrical reminiscence, \u201cIn Persons.\u201d The next year, they played a biblical husband and wife in a revival of Clifford Odets\u2019s \u201cFlowering Peach\u201d by the National Actors Theater, and in 2000 they were a pair of retired comedians in Anne Meara\u2019s Off Broadway play \u201cDown the Garden Paths.\u201d<\/p>\n
In between appearances with Ms. Jackson, Mr. Wallach played, among other roles, an aging gay barber in Charles Dyer\u2019s \u201cStaircase\u201d (1968), a political dissident consigned to an asylum in Tom Stoppard\u2019s \u201cEvery Good Boy Deserves Favour\u201d (1979), an aged but mentally spry furniture dealer in a 1992 revival of Arthur Miller\u2019s play \u201cThe Price\u201d and a Jewish widower in Jeff Baron\u2019s \u201cVisiting Mr. Green\u201d (1997).<\/p>\n
Mr. Wallach\u2019s many television credits included a 1974 production of Odets\u2019s \u201cParadise Lost\u201d on public television; \u201cSkokie,\u201d a 1981 CBS movie about a march planned by neo-Nazis in a Chicago suburb, in which he played a lawyer representing Holocaust survivors; a 1982 NBC dramatization of Norman Mailer\u2019s \u201cExecutioner\u2019s Song,\u201d in which he appeared with Tommy Lee Jones; and frequent roles on \u201cStudio One,\u201d \u201cPlayhouse 90,\u201d \u201cGeneral Electric Theater.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then there were films, dozens of them. In addition to his parts in \u201cBaby Doll\u201d and \u201cThe Magnificent Seven,\u201d he played the mechanic pal of Clark Gable\u2019s aging cowboy in \u201cThe Misfits\u201d (1961), the story of a wild-horse roundup in Nevada, written by Miller and directed by John Huston, with a cast that also included Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift.<\/p>\n
Mr. Wallach was also a lawless jungle tyrant subdued by the title character (Peter O\u2019Toole) in \u201cLord Jim\u201d (1965); a rapacious Mexican pitted against Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in Sergio Leone\u2019s so-called spaghetti western \u201cThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly\u201d (1966); a psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the sanity of a call girl (Barbra Streisand) on trial for killing a client in \u201cNuts\u201d (1987); and Don Altobello, a Mafia boss who succumbs to a poisoned dessert, in \u201cThe Godfather: Part III\u201d (1990).<\/p>\n
He continued his film work well into his 90s. He was a disillusioned screenwriter in \u201cThe Holiday\u201d (2006). In \u201cTickling Leo\u201d (2009), he played the guilt-ridden patriarch of a Jewish family still haunted by the Holocaust. In Roman Polanski\u2019s \u201cGhost Writer\u201d (2010), Mr. Wallach played a mysterious old man living on fog-shrouded Martha\u2019s Vineyard. And in \u201cWall Street: Money Never Sleeps\u201d (2010), which marked the return of Michael Douglas as the greed-stoked investor Gordon Gekko, Mr. Wallach hovered at the edge of the action like Poe\u2019s sinister raven.<\/p>\n
More often than not, his film roles required him to play mustachioed characters who were lawless, evil or just plain nasty, which puzzled and challenged him. \u201cActually I lead a dual life,\u201d he once said. \u201cIn the theater, I\u2019m the little man, or the irritated man, the misunderstood man,\u201d whereas in films \u201cI do seem to keep getting cast as the bad guys.\u201d His villain roles, he said, tended to be \u201cmore complex\u201d than some of his stage roles.<\/p>\n
Even so, the theater remained his home base, and he said that he could never imagine leaving it. \u201cWhat else am I going to do?\u201d he asked in an interview with The Times in 1997. \u201cI love to act.\u201d<\/p>\n