Martin Landau
Martin Landau is an actor, born 1928.
Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Martin Landau worked as an actor, an acting coach and an editorial cartoonist. His screen career started in the late fifties, and one of his earliest film roles is still among the quietly strangest things in a Hitchcock picture: Leonard in North by Northwest (1959), a henchman whose loyalty to his employer is played with an intensity the script never explains and never needs to. Cleopatra (1963) followed, as Rufio.
Television made him famous. Three seasons of Mission: Impossible brought Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe, and Space: 1999 kept him a household face into the late seventies. Then came a long, unglamorous stretch where the offers were mostly genre pictures: Meteor, Without Warning, Alone in the Dark, the kind of decade that ends most careers quietly.
His did the opposite. Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) brought a Golden Globe and his first Oscar nomination. Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) brought the second, as Judah Rosenthal, an outwardly respectable man conducting a private moral collapse. And Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) brought the Academy Award, the Screen Actors Guild award and another Golden Globe, in a performance that is funny and pitiless and refuses to make its subject dignified.
He kept working until his death in 2017: Abe Petrovsky in Rounders, Harry Trimble in The Majestic, voices for 9 and Frankenweenie, and Max Rosenbaum in Remember (2015).
Movies (49)
- Sleepy Hollow (1999)
- Rounders (1998)
- 9 (2009)
- Sliver (1993)
- Cleopatra (1963)
- Nevada Smith (1966)
- North by Northwest (1959)
- The X-Files (1998)
- The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
- Frankenweenie (2012)
- City of Ember (2008)
- City Hall (1996)
- Joseph (1995)
- Ed Wood (1994)
- The Majestic (2001)
- Meteor (1979)
- Hollywood Homicide (2003)
- EDtv (1999)
- Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
- The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996)
- B.A.P.S (1997)
- 12:01 (1993)
- Remember (2015)
- Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
- Intersection (1994)
- Mistress (1992)
- Savage! (1973)
- Ready to Rumble (2000)
- Love, Antosha (2019)
- The Return of the Six-Million-Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987)
TV (13)
Where to start with Martin Landau
Watch Ed Wood first. It is the Oscar performance and it deserves the reputation: Landau plays Bela Lugosi as vain, foul-mouthed, frightened and still magnetic, and never once asks you to feel sorry for him.
Then go back to North by Northwest to see the same actor at thirty-one doing something unnervingly quiet with a supporting villain, and forward to Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is the toughest thing on the list and the one that most rewards a rewatch.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream is the film that restarted him and it is warmer than either of the above. For the television that made his name, Mission: Impossible is where the craft is and Space: 1999 is where the seventies are. Rounders and Frankenweenie are the late-period pleasures, one a shrewd cameo, the other pure vocal relish.