Eli Wallach Dead: One Of Hollywood’s Greatest Character Actors Passes At 98


Eli Wallach, one of Hollywood’s most gifted and prolific actors, is dead at age 98, his daughter confirmed on Tuesday. While Wallach never reached the heights of Hollywood stardom, his distinguished and widely varied career spanned a remarkable seven decades, with his first film Baby Doll in 1956, through his final screen appearance in 2010 at the age of 94, when he appeared in the Oliver Stone film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

In 1990, Eli Wallach appeared in two other sequels to Hollywood classics, with parts in The Godfather Part III — in which he plays the scheming Don Altobello who plots to kill Michael Corleone — and The Two Jakes, the follow-up to the 1974 film Chinatown.

But of his many roles, Wallach is probably best remembered as the unscrupulous Tuco in the 1966 Clint Eastwood-starring “spaghetti western” The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

Amazingly, Wallach never received an Academy Award nomination. But in 2010, he was given an honorary Oscar for being what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences described as “the quintessential chameleon, effortlessly inhabiting a wide range of characters, while putting his inimitable stamp on every role.”

Born in 1915, a first-generation Amrerican whose Parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, Eli Wallach studied acting in New York at the famed Actor’s Studio, alongside classmates who would also go on to become some of the greatest actors in film history, including Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

Wallach also met his wife Anne Jackson at The Actor’s Studio, and the couple appeared in numerous films and stage plays together over the years.

But though Wallach became one of the best-respected actors in Hollywood, he always looked at the movies as a way to generate cash, to support the pursuit of his true passion, theater.

“For actors, movies are a means to an end,” Mr. Wallach told The New York Times in 1973. “I go and get on a horse in Spain for 10 weeks, and I have enough cushion to come back and do a play.”

Though the Brooklyn of his youth was heavily Jewish, Eli Wallach grew up in a mostly Italian-American neighborhood and perhaps as a result, often skillfully portrayed Italians in the movies, as in Godfather III.

In fact, his screen debut Baby Doll was as an Italian, Silva Viccaro. The film was directed by Elia Kazan and featured a screenplay by the great American playwright Tennessee Williams.

Eli Wallach also appeared in another classic western of the 1960s, The Magnificent Seven, as well as in the John Huston-directed The Misfits, which was the last film to star Marilyn Monroe.

Eli Wallach is survived by his wife, who is now 87, and three children.

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