#so it’s like I want to say Arthur would win. but also harlem faces like galactic threats in an overpowered super world yknow what I mean

[zeb-z]

I think Arthur Bennett and Harlem Shade should meet. They’re so similar yet so different - shadow power users with a flair for the dramatics. If you put them in the same room only one would make it out, I think

[swanlake1998]

Article: Cicely Tyson and the Enduring Legacy of Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem

Date: February 24, 2021

By: Zita Allen

Cicely Tyson, the legendary 96-year-old Black actress whose February 16 funeral at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church was attended by, among others, Tyler Perry, Lenny Kravitz, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, is remembered for performances that transcended stereotypes and made an indelible impression on a nation's heart and soul.

Among the most fondly remembered is her breakout role in the 1972 movie Sounder, which depicts a Black sharecropper family's struggle to survive in the Jim Crow South. The role catapulted Tyson to stardom, winning her an Academy Award nomination and a reputation as someone committed to enhancing Blacks' representation in the arts. Throughout a seven-decade career, countless critically acclaimed, award-winning roles in films, onstage and on television reaffirmed that image. Yet one role reflecting the depth of that commitment is much less visible—the supporting one she played working with longtime friend Arthur Mitchell when he envisioned, shaped and established the groundbreaking Dance Theatre of Harlem.

The first time many learned of it was during the Riverside Church tribute following Mitchell's passing in 2018. There the elegant, petite Tyson recalled, through tears and laughter, their decades-long friendship: "To say he was one of the dearest persons in my life is an understatement." The story she shared that day, which is recounted in her current memoir Just As I Am (written with Michelle Buford), involves an important piece of dance history.

Following the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tyson writes that she and Mitchell, like so many others, wanted to "carry on Dr. King's legacy...to move his dream from rhetoric to reality." Then, Mitchell had a brainstorm. It happened one morning at 3 am, during one of their hours-long, late-night phone calls that had become a habit following their chance meeting on a New York City street several years earlier, when Tyson's star was beginning to ascend and Mitchell's was shining bright at New York City Ballet, where he would become the company's first Black principal dancer. That night on the phone, Mitchell had a eureka moment: "I've decided what we should do. I am going to form my own dance company." Tyson recalls, "The fervor in my friend's voice, the passion with which he spoke, dragged me from my bed. I washed my face, pulled on a trench over my pajamas, and took a cab over to his place a few streets away. On Arthur's living room floor, amid papers and photographs he'd assembled while brainstorming, we sat talking about how we could move his vision forward."

Before the sun came up, they had invited the actor Brock Peters, a mutual friend, to join the deliberations. The three thrashed out Mitchell's vision, as Tyson writes, of "opening a classical ballet school, a place where Black children—toes pointed, horizons expanded—could learn the rigors and discipline that had lifted him toward prominence." And, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Mitchell would reach out to his mentor, famed ballet teacher Karel Shook, beckoning him to return to New York from the Netherlands to be part of the venture, and secure the pivotal support of NYCB's George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein.

Countless young dancers have benefited from the vision hatched during a late-night phone call between two close friends. Not the least among them is DTH's current artistic director and founding company member Virginia Johnson, whose career includes critically acclaimed performances in such ballets as Balanchine's Agon, Giselle, A Streetcar Named Desire and Fall River Legend.

Recalling the charismatic Tyson, Johnson said recently that the actress was not only a dear friend of Mitchell's but also served on the DTH board for a time, becoming one of the company's national advisors. "[She was] a voice we looked to," said Johnson, "to tell us how she saw DTH in the world as the world changed, moving forward." Tyson even accompanied DTH on tour, teaching acting classes for the dancers. "It was an amazing experience," Johnson said. "She was teaching us a craft that we would use as dancers as much as she used it as an actor." In fact, while Johnson's roles in such dramatic ballets as Agnes De Mille's Fall River Legend "came in the '80s, when Tyson was no longer that involved with the company," Johnson said, "what she taught me in those early days stayed with me and were part of the tools I used to develop those characters."

Of course, Cicely Tyson will always be remembered as the legendary actress whose career reflected a desire to shatter stereotypes and battle injustice. She portrayed characters who embodied strength, resilience and dignity. She must also be remembered as Arthur Mitchell's dear friend who helped form the blueprint of a ballet company that would accomplish a similar mission: shattering stereotypes and battling injustice while embodying excellence.

[edmundminoredinfilm]

The Oscar Nominations I Want

Tomorrow the Academy’s nominations for the Oscars come out and I am excited, but I am also prepared for the inevitable punch to the stomach I will feel when I see what movies the Academy left out in their nominations and when I see what movies they thought were worthy, when I could not agree less. Here I am going to list the movies, performances, directors, scripts and more that I feel most passionately should be nominated. At the bottom I have listed out my rankings for what I think is worthy of Best Picture, Lead Actress, Lead Actor, Actress in a Supporting Role, Actor in a Supporting Role, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, Production Design and Cinematography. These are not predictions, just what I personally think and feel about these movies. I wish more people would write pieces about their opinions as opposed to predictions, because all those pieces become so similar to each other.

BABY DRIVER - Win for Director, Nominations for Best Picture, Supporting Actor+

Baby Driver will not be nominated for a lot of awards. I think that is unfair. Perhaps it will not win (or be nominated) for many awards because of the Academy’s war on fun movies. I say this jokingly, but it seems that movies that are fun have problems winning Oscars, especially Best Picture. La La Land was very fun last year and lost to Moonlight, a great movie but a heavy one. The year before Mad Max, an adrenaline-fueled and fun, technical masterpiece, was robbed by the good and important, Spotlight, which although good and important, was not very fun (sex abuse by religious figures – not fun). The years before that you have Birdman (suicide, drug abuse – not fun), 12 Years a Slave (slavery – not fun), Argo (Iranian hostage crisis – not fun). Baby Driver, perhaps to its own demise, is unapologetically fun. With great acting, editing and perfect sounds (effects and the soundtrack of the year), Baby Driver should be nominated for Best Picture.

Baby Driver features wonderful performances by its male lead (Ansel Elgort) and his lady friend (Lily James). It also has great supporting acting by Kevin Spacey (yuck), Jon Hamm and Jamie Foxx. The best acting of the movie, I believe, comes from CJ Jones, an actor, who happens to be deaf, who plays Baby’s foster father. Jones manages to be both laugh out loud funny and touch the viewer emotionally by perfectly portraying the concern and worry he has, not for his own life, but for Baby’s. On top of this, he manages to do it all without speaking a single word. Jones should receive a nomination for Supporting Actor.

The film’s stylized action, speed and over-the-top violence will remind viewers of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz. The action being strung together by a wonderful playlist that accompanies the film will remind viewers of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (also directed by Edgar Wright); the title sequence of Scott Pilgrim may jump into viewer’s minds during the masterfully crafted “Harlem Shuffle” sequence during the beginning of Baby Driver – probably the best 3 minutes of movie from all of 2017. Wright, whose style is stamped all over this movie, should win for Director.

It should also at least receive nominations in film editing, sound editing and sound mixing. This gives Baby Driver 1 win and 6 nominations.

A GHOST STORY - Win for Cinematography, Nominations for Best Picture, Original Score 

Not only do I think that David Lowery’s movie, which was made on a $100,000 budget, should be nominated for Best Picture, I think it should be nominated for Best Picture even if we were doing the old school, pre-King’s Speech format where only five movies were nominated. It is a top 5 flick from this past year and a darn shame that it will likely not see a single nomination. It is doomed by many things: a low budget, Casey Affleck as the lead role and the backlash he has faced with #MeToo and the backlash the Academy faced giving him a major award last year (I think Casey Affleck is yucky, don’t get me wrong), a summer release date and the fact that no one saw it – it made just $1.9 million (good when considering its budget, but that is not a lot of people). The film’s score is just the right amount of melancholy for it, the camera work is stunning and Rooney Mara is haunting as a young widow. If Mara had just a few more minutes on screen OR if the lead actress field was not so strong this year, I would be petitioning for her to receive an acting nomination. This totals up to a movie that should receive a nomination for Best Picture.

For those unfamiliar, the film follows a dead man (Casey Affleck) in his afterlife. Affleck has a sheet draped over himself for almost the entirety of the movie, so an acting nomination seems out of the question for him. But his ghost, the way he moves and what he looks at, paints a vivid picture of the longing that he feels in this sort-of-purgatorial afterlife. The camera does the talking for the ghost, and it does so quite effectively. Simple shots, while no words are being spoken, bring an emotional response from the viewer. With minimalist dialogue, the film successfully explores themes of death, loss, the afterlife, purpose, love and determination. It does so through masterful cinematography and that is why Andrew Droz Palermo (the film’s cinematographer) should win the Oscar for Cinematography.

It should also be nominated for original score. This gives A Ghost Story 1 win and 3 nominations.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT - Win for Actress in a Lead Role+

The Florida Project is getting a lot of buzz. Willem Dafoe is getting talked about for Supporting Actor (I have him as one of my nominees); Sean Michael Baker is getting talked about for Director (he’s up there on my list, too). But, why is no one talking about Brooklynn Prince who plays six-year old Moonee? No actor has impressed me more this than this young actress. Moonee is a complex character that goes through so much in this movie; neglect, loss of friends, moving, no stable family life or income, and more that I will avoid saying so as I do not give away the plot. The fact that this young actress, or any actress of any age, can do this so well is a credit to her and director Sean Baker. Someone is going to need to make this girl a Wikipedia page because she deserves to win Best Actress in a Lead Role.

The Florida Project also deserves nominations for Best Picture, Actor in a Supporting Role (Willem Dafoe), and Director (Sean Baker). It should win 1 Oscar and receive 4 nominations.

MOLLY’S GAME - Win for Adapted Screenplay

I feel bad for Jessica Chastain. She absolutely kills it in this movie as an injured skier turned poker organizer. I feel so bad for her, because I cannot put her in my top 5 lead actresses for the year (I’m sure somehow Jessica Chastain will get over me not giving her my fictional tumblr vote). It is too strong a field. Her and Rooney Mara (A Ghost Story) would have both received votes from me if there movie came out in any one of the past handful of years, but not in 2017. I also feel bad for Molly’s Game because it just narrowly misses my Best Picture list (it comes in at #11, and you gotta make top 10). That said, the screenplay, based on Molly Bloom’s memoir is what I have winning Adapted Screenplay. Sharp dialogue is a standout component of this Aaron Sorkin screenplay that takes a look at our justice system and patriarchy. Sorkin cleverly ties poker into Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and shows that no matter if it is during the Salem Witch Trials, or in 1953 when Miller wrote the play, or in 21st century America, somethings seem to never change.

It should receive 1 win on 1 nomination.

PHANTOM THREAD - Win for Production Design & Costume Design, Nominations for Best Picture+

Phantom Thread should receive quite a few Oscar nominations tomorrow morning, including for Best Picture, Actor in a Lead Role (could win), Score, Production Design, Costume Design. It could also easily take in nominations for Director, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay. 

When I saw Phantom Thread, I knew absolutely nothing going into it. It is darker than one might guess from its rather vague trailer. If you have seen the trailer you may have absolutely no idea what Phantom Thread is about, but you will surely see that it looks beautiful and that each scene is meticulously composed by artists and an obsessive director. No movie has the attention to deal that must have been required to create Phantom Thread, other than Phantom Thread, which is why it should win for Production Design and Costume Design.

Phantom Thread is deserving of 2 wins on at least 6 nominations.

THE SHAPE OF WATER - Win for Best Picture and Much More

While Baby Driver was my favorite movie of the year, it was not the best movie to hit the big screen this year. That title belongs to Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece: The Shape of Water. The visual effects top any other movie this year. When you watch it and another movie with high budget effects, for example Wonder Woman, it is shocking how much more was spent on other movies than Shape of Water (for example, Wonder Woman’s budget exceeded Shape of Water’s by $130 million). The film blends the central plot, the romance between a mute janitor (Sally Hawkins) and an aquatic humanoid, with well executed subplots that make the movie more exciting (Russian spies!), more intense (Michael Shannon’s power), and more relatable (Richard Jenkins’ and Sally Hawkins’ characters striving for companionship). The themes brought to the forefront of discussion by del Toro include repressed sexuality and masculinity’s relationship with power.

Shape should win Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Michael Shannon), and Original Score. I would tack on nominations for Actress in a Lead Role (Sally Hawkins), Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer), Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Production Design and Visual Effects. Shape should win 3 Oscars and be nominated for at least 9 awards.

BEST PICTURE:

Winner: The Shape of Water

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Baby Driver, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, A Ghost Story, The Florida Project, Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread, Lady Bird, Get Out

DIRECTOR

Winner: Edgar Wright (Baby Driver)

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Sean Baker (The Florida Project), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk)

ACTRESS IN A LEAD ROLE

Winner: Brooklynn Prince (The Florida Project)

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Frances McDormand (Three Billboards), Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water), Margot Robbie (I, Tonya), Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird)

ACTOR IN A LEAD ROLE

Winner: Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name)

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), empty space here until I see The Darkest Hour

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Winner: Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread)

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird), Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Holly Hunter (The Big Sick)

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Winner: Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water)

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards), Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project), Woody Harrelson (Three Billboards), CJ Jones (Baby Driver)

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Winner: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Get Out, The Shape of Water, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Winner: Molly’s Game

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Call Me By Your Name, The Disaster Artist, Blade Runner: 2049, The Beguiled

ORIGINAL SCORE:

Winner: The Shape of Water

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): A Ghost Story, Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread

CINEMATOGRAPHY 

Winner: A Ghost Story 

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): Blade Runner: 2049, The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, The Beguiled

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Winner: Phantom Thread

Nominees (in order of how I’d vote): The Shape of Water, Blade Runner: 2049, Dunkirk, Wonder Wheel

Thanks for reading, everyone!

[jimdsmith34]

Martin Landau on His Relationship With Marilyn Monroe, Playing Gay for Hitchcock, and His Oscars Triumph

For Martin Landau, the turning point came when he found himself watching the 1984 Academy Awards, “having a beer in my underwear, saying: ‘I should be there.’”

In 2012, Landau—then 84—recalled this to me in an interview for the Times of London as the moment he knew he wanted to save his career.

Starring roles as a Hitchcock villain or in the TV series of Mission: Impossible were lost to the mists of time. Agents had told Landau he was “finished.”

“It was frustrating. I knew what I was able to do, I was at the height of my powers but no one was giving me the chance,” the charming and wry Landau told me. And so his fightback began, not simply for recognition and glory, but also just to act—his true and abiding passion.

The career of the Academy Award-winning actor—who died Sunday at 89 after unexpected complications during a stay at the UCLA Medical Center—spanned many generations, many peaks and troughs, and many characters on our TV and cinema screens.

Perhaps you remember him as Rollin Hand in the original TV series of Mission: Impossible (for which Landau won a TV Golden Globe for Best Male TV Star in 1968), or—as it is for me—the tunic-wearing silver fox Commander John Koenig in the 1970s drama Space: 1999.

Yet, as that 1984 nadir showed, Landau’s career was uneven to say the least, going from playing the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)—which he later told me he deliberately played as a gay man—to a role in the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.

The serious movie awards came later in Landau’s life, after he had roused himself from the mid-1980s doldrums.

First came a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, and an Oscar nomination, for his performance as a financier in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Landau’s second Oscar nomination came for playing a shifty and panicked adulterer in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

He finally won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as horror movie star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), and he won the corresponding Golden Globe for that too, as well as many other laurels. Landau also amassed six Emmy nominations, including one for appearing in Entourage.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Landau told me of winning the Oscar. There are wonderful pictures of him kissing the statuette and giving a humble salute as he holds it. That humility, and a gentleness, was evident the day we met.

“I felt I knew Lugosi,” Landau told me. “Like him I had worked for good directors and terrible directors. I went thinking I was going to have a nice dinner and probably be miserable at the end of the night.”

“When I win you can see Samuel L. Jackson [nominated for Pulp Fiction] say ‘Shit,’ probably the most honest reaction one can have.”

When I met Landau in 2012, it was connected to Burton’s Frankenweenie, the first black and white animation shot in 3-D, which had just been released.

In what was a remake of a 1984 Burton short film, Landau voiced a science teacher who, by electrocuting a dead frog into life, inspired a 10-year-old Victor Frankenstein in ’60s American suburbia to reanimate his beloved dead dog.

Naturally, chaos of the comic and fairly gruesome kind ensued, all the magnificently weird visions of Burton distilled into a unique format; the 3-D element making it particularly eye-popping for cinema audiences.

Landau was happy: Though he was a well-known name, his fame was not of the supersonic kind enjoyed by his one-time best friend James Dean or his one-time paramour Marilyn Monroe. Landau was a link to old Hollywood, and after a career that zig-zagged around film and TV, in his later years he finally gained critical lionization.

And so, of course, Landau had tales to tell in a nondescript conference room of his agent Dick Guttman’s Los Angeles office, all in his magnificently gravelly voice. He was both warm, wonderful company and a candid raconteur.

Meeting Marilyn

He had met Monroe—she a couple of years his senior—under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York.

“She was there because she was dissatisfied,” Landau told me. “People perceived her as a Hollywood blonde bimbo. She was very needy and would go from being on top of her game to absolutely bereft of any self-belief or confidence. She see-sawed between those two personalities.”

Landau told me that when he and Monroe would go to the theater, she would change her outfits many times. “We’d never see the first act of the play.”

I asked if he desired her. “She was terrific… I don’t talk about those things,” he replied quietly.

Did he have a relationship with her, I asked.

“I had a relationship with her. It was just before Arthur [Miller, the playwright; he and Monroe married in 1956]. It was an interesting relationship, I look at it very differently than the way I did then. She was incredibly attractive but very difficult.”

I asked how he coped with that. “You can’t. That’s why I didn’t.” It lasted “several months,” he said, he not able to negotiate the poles of her personality. “Yeah, you didn’t know which one would show up in the middle of something.” I asked if he ended the relationship. “I did, by becoming more busy.” Was she upset by that? “I don’t know, probably. I didn’t want to upset her.” Because she was fragile? “Yes. I busied myself with other things.”

After the relationship ended, Landau and Monroe saw each other “a couple of times in passing” in New York and Los Angeles, he told me.

I asked Landau if he was in love with Monroe.

“I don’t know if I was in love with her or fascinated by her or flattered by her. She was incredibly attractive and fun to be with much of the time. When she wasn’t she wasn’t. I mean, that was the problem. She could get very withdrawn.”

Did he want to marry her, I asked. “No, no. It was almost a form of purgatory. I never knew who [ie, which Marilyn] I was going to be with.”

Landau told me he had been changing planes in Rome in 1962 when he read that Monroe had died.

“I was heartbroken. As the mystery unfolded I was more and more shocked. It didn’t seem possible that she killed herself intentionally. It was possible she took more barbiturates than necessary, just losing count, or possibly it was foul play. Nobody knows.”

‘Martin, You Have a Circus Going on Inside You’

Landau grew up in Brooklyn: his father had been a machinist; his mother, he told me, took him to the movies. He was sensitive, and loved acting and drawing. When he listened to radio dramas like The Shadow with Orson Welles, it “allowed you to create a set of images and characters.”

Landau studied art at the Pratt Institute and became a cartoonist for the Daily News in New York. (“Tim and I work well together,” Landau said of Burton. “I understand him, we both started as cartoonists.”)

Landau quit that job after seeing a friend act and deciding he could do better. He attended the Actors Studio (Steve McQueen was a fellow student), and later he became its artistic director, tutoring such stars as Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. He headed the Hollywood branch until his death.

Hitchcock saw Landau’s stage performance in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night and cast him in North by Northwest (1959), saying: “Martin, you have a circus going on inside you. Obviously if you can do that part you can play this little trinket.”

In the movie, Landau’s character wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s because, Landau decided, his character “had to be gay; she was interfering with his relationship” with James Mason’s character. “I made it subtle; I knew in big cities they’d get it. Hitch loved it. People told me: ‘Don’t play gay. It will affect your career.’ I said: ‘I’m an actor.’”

He recalled to me meeting his friend James Dean—“he was a farm boy, I was a New Yorker”—at an open casting call. Dean asked him how the process worked, and Landau, observing how different they looked, deduced they would not compete for roles.

Regarding Monroe and Dean’s early deaths, Landau told me: “It’s so hard because everyone else I’ve known who died got old—they’re both frozen in time.”

Landau was married to the actress Barbara Bain from 1957 until their divorce in 1993: a “natural end,” he told me.

They had met at an acting class, and Space: 1999 fans will remember they starred opposite each other in that show. (They had first starred alongside one another in Mission: Impossible.) Landau is survived by Bain and their two daughters Susie and Juliet.

Facing Ageism in Hollywood

Landau cherished his late-career renaissance. “Ageism is something that does exist,” he told Deadline in April. “As a young actor, I was working much more readily, and being offered more things. I don’t like to do what I call ‘the grunters’—a character who sits at a table and grunts, and young people make fun of. I turn a lot of those down. I like a character that is still alive, and is necessarily thinking, and either grows or diminishes, or whatever.”

As for never making the A-list, Landau seemed sanguine. “I think it would have held me back in a certain way,” he told me. “I played a wide variety of roles.” Others had “great careers and became major stars, but I played more things, had more fun, and I’m still doing it.”

Indeed he was. After Frankenweenie came more roles: in The Red Maple Leaf with Kris Kristofferson and James Caan; Remember, alongside Christopher Plummer; and, most recently, The Last Poker Game opposite Paul Sorvino. Three other projects are listed at various stages of production on Landau’s IMDb page: Herstory, Without Ward, and Nate & Al.

‘An Actor’s Actor’

When it came time to say farewell that day in 2012, Landau told me he had greatly enjoyed our conversation. He suggested to me and to Guttman that, should he ever come to write it, would I like to work on his memoir with him?

Nothing ever came to pass, although I was extremely heartened to read tonight, via Deadline, that Landau had been working on a memoir at the time of his death. A documentary, appropriately titled An Actor’s Actor: The Life of Martin Landau, is also apparently in development.

Landau was both quite the storyteller and also a true actor's actor, so both projects, should they reach fruition will be fascinating. Landau believed in acting, rather than stardom, passionately—as both craft and vocation. That might explain his longevity and late-in-life triumphs. It certainly illuminates why it was an honor and pleasure to meet and spend time with Martin Landau.

source http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/02/martin-landau-on-his-relationship-with-marilyn-monroe-playing-gay-for-hitchcock-and-his-oscars-triumph/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/11/martin-landau-on-his-relationship-with.html

[adambstingus]

Martin Landau on His Relationship With Marilyn Monroe, Playing Gay for Hitchcock, and His Oscars Triumph

For Martin Landau, the turning point came when he found himself watching the 1984 Academy Awards, “having a beer in my underwear, saying: ‘I should be there.’”

In 2012, Landau—then 84—recalled this to me in an interview for the Times of London as the moment he knew he wanted to save his career.

Starring roles as a Hitchcock villain or in the TV series of Mission: Impossible were lost to the mists of time. Agents had told Landau he was “finished.”

“It was frustrating. I knew what I was able to do, I was at the height of my powers but no one was giving me the chance,” the charming and wry Landau told me. And so his fightback began, not simply for recognition and glory, but also just to act—his true and abiding passion.

The career of the Academy Award-winning actor—who died Sunday at 89 after unexpected complications during a stay at the UCLA Medical Center—spanned many generations, many peaks and troughs, and many characters on our TV and cinema screens.

Perhaps you remember him as Rollin Hand in the original TV series of Mission: Impossible (for which Landau won a TV Golden Globe for Best Male TV Star in 1968), or—as it is for me—the tunic-wearing silver fox Commander John Koenig in the 1970s drama Space: 1999.

Yet, as that 1984 nadir showed, Landau’s career was uneven to say the least, going from playing the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)—which he later told me he deliberately played as a gay man—to a role in the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.

The serious movie awards came later in Landau’s life, after he had roused himself from the mid-1980s doldrums.

First came a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, and an Oscar nomination, for his performance as a financier in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Landau’s second Oscar nomination came for playing a shifty and panicked adulterer in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

He finally won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as horror movie star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), and he won the corresponding Golden Globe for that too, as well as many other laurels. Landau also amassed six Emmy nominations, including one for appearing in Entourage.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Landau told me of winning the Oscar. There are wonderful pictures of him kissing the statuette and giving a humble salute as he holds it. That humility, and a gentleness, was evident the day we met.

“I felt I knew Lugosi,” Landau told me. “Like him I had worked for good directors and terrible directors. I went thinking I was going to have a nice dinner and probably be miserable at the end of the night.”

“When I win you can see Samuel L. Jackson [nominated for Pulp Fiction] say ‘Shit,’ probably the most honest reaction one can have.”

When I met Landau in 2012, it was connected to Burton’s Frankenweenie, the first black and white animation shot in 3-D, which had just been released.

In what was a remake of a 1984 Burton short film, Landau voiced a science teacher who, by electrocuting a dead frog into life, inspired a 10-year-old Victor Frankenstein in ’60s American suburbia to reanimate his beloved dead dog.

Naturally, chaos of the comic and fairly gruesome kind ensued, all the magnificently weird visions of Burton distilled into a unique format; the 3-D element making it particularly eye-popping for cinema audiences.

Landau was happy: Though he was a well-known name, his fame was not of the supersonic kind enjoyed by his one-time best friend James Dean or his one-time paramour Marilyn Monroe. Landau was a link to old Hollywood, and after a career that zig-zagged around film and TV, in his later years he finally gained critical lionization.

And so, of course, Landau had tales to tell in a nondescript conference room of his agent Dick Guttman’s Los Angeles office, all in his magnificently gravelly voice. He was both warm, wonderful company and a candid raconteur.

Meeting Marilyn

He had met Monroe—she a couple of years his senior—under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York.

“She was there because she was dissatisfied,” Landau told me. “People perceived her as a Hollywood blonde bimbo. She was very needy and would go from being on top of her game to absolutely bereft of any self-belief or confidence. She see-sawed between those two personalities.”

Landau told me that when he and Monroe would go to the theater, she would change her outfits many times. “We’d never see the first act of the play.”

I asked if he desired her. “She was terrific… I don’t talk about those things,” he replied quietly.

Did he have a relationship with her, I asked.

“I had a relationship with her. It was just before Arthur [Miller, the playwright; he and Monroe married in 1956]. It was an interesting relationship, I look at it very differently than the way I did then. She was incredibly attractive but very difficult.”

I asked how he coped with that. “You can’t. That’s why I didn’t.” It lasted “several months,” he said, he not able to negotiate the poles of her personality. “Yeah, you didn’t know which one would show up in the middle of something.” I asked if he ended the relationship. “I did, by becoming more busy.” Was she upset by that? “I don’t know, probably. I didn’t want to upset her.” Because she was fragile? “Yes. I busied myself with other things.”

After the relationship ended, Landau and Monroe saw each other “a couple of times in passing” in New York and Los Angeles, he told me.

I asked Landau if he was in love with Monroe.

“I don’t know if I was in love with her or fascinated by her or flattered by her. She was incredibly attractive and fun to be with much of the time. When she wasn’t she wasn’t. I mean, that was the problem. She could get very withdrawn.”

Did he want to marry her, I asked. “No, no. It was almost a form of purgatory. I never knew who [ie, which Marilyn] I was going to be with.”

Landau told me he had been changing planes in Rome in 1962 when he read that Monroe had died.

“I was heartbroken. As the mystery unfolded I was more and more shocked. It didn’t seem possible that she killed herself intentionally. It was possible she took more barbiturates than necessary, just losing count, or possibly it was foul play. Nobody knows.”

‘Martin, You Have a Circus Going on Inside You’

Landau grew up in Brooklyn: his father had been a machinist; his mother, he told me, took him to the movies. He was sensitive, and loved acting and drawing. When he listened to radio dramas like The Shadow with Orson Welles, it “allowed you to create a set of images and characters.”

Landau studied art at the Pratt Institute and became a cartoonist for the Daily News in New York. (“Tim and I work well together,” Landau said of Burton. “I understand him, we both started as cartoonists.”)

Landau quit that job after seeing a friend act and deciding he could do better. He attended the Actors Studio (Steve McQueen was a fellow student), and later he became its artistic director, tutoring such stars as Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. He headed the Hollywood branch until his death.

Hitchcock saw Landau’s stage performance in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night and cast him in North by Northwest (1959), saying: “Martin, you have a circus going on inside you. Obviously if you can do that part you can play this little trinket.”

In the movie, Landau’s character wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s because, Landau decided, his character “had to be gay; she was interfering with his relationship” with James Mason’s character. “I made it subtle; I knew in big cities they’d get it. Hitch loved it. People told me: ‘Don’t play gay. It will affect your career.’ I said: ‘I’m an actor.’”

He recalled to me meeting his friend James Dean—“he was a farm boy, I was a New Yorker”—at an open casting call. Dean asked him how the process worked, and Landau, observing how different they looked, deduced they would not compete for roles.

Regarding Monroe and Dean’s early deaths, Landau told me: “It’s so hard because everyone else I’ve known who died got old—they’re both frozen in time.”

Landau was married to the actress Barbara Bain from 1957 until their divorce in 1993: a “natural end,” he told me.

They had met at an acting class, and Space: 1999 fans will remember they starred opposite each other in that show. (They had first starred alongside one another in Mission: Impossible.) Landau is survived by Bain and their two daughters Susie and Juliet.

Facing Ageism in Hollywood

Landau cherished his late-career renaissance. “Ageism is something that does exist,” he told Deadline in April. “As a young actor, I was working much more readily, and being offered more things. I don’t like to do what I call ‘the grunters’—a character who sits at a table and grunts, and young people make fun of. I turn a lot of those down. I like a character that is still alive, and is necessarily thinking, and either grows or diminishes, or whatever.”

As for never making the A-list, Landau seemed sanguine. “I think it would have held me back in a certain way,” he told me. “I played a wide variety of roles.” Others had “great careers and became major stars, but I played more things, had more fun, and I’m still doing it.”

Indeed he was. After Frankenweenie came more roles: in The Red Maple Leaf with Kris Kristofferson and James Caan; Remember, alongside Christopher Plummer; and, most recently, The Last Poker Game opposite Paul Sorvino. Three other projects are listed at various stages of production on Landau’s IMDb page: Herstory, Without Ward, and Nate & Al.

‘An Actor’s Actor’

When it came time to say farewell that day in 2012, Landau told me he had greatly enjoyed our conversation. He suggested to me and to Guttman that, should he ever come to write it, would I like to work on his memoir with him?

Nothing ever came to pass, although I was extremely heartened to read tonight, via Deadline, that Landau had been working on a memoir at the time of his death. A documentary, appropriately titled An Actor’s Actor: The Life of Martin Landau, is also apparently in development.

Landau was both quite the storyteller and also a true actor’s actor, so both projects, should they reach fruition will be fascinating. Landau believed in acting, rather than stardom, passionately—as both craft and vocation. That might explain his longevity and late-in-life triumphs. It certainly illuminates why it was an honor and pleasure to meet and spend time with Martin Landau.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/02/martin-landau-on-his-relationship-with-marilyn-monroe-playing-gay-for-hitchcock-and-his-oscars-triumph/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/167043370892

[samanthasroberts]

Martin Landau on His Relationship With Marilyn Monroe, Playing Gay for Hitchcock, and His Oscars Triumph

For Martin Landau, the turning point came when he found himself watching the 1984 Academy Awards, “having a beer in my underwear, saying: ‘I should be there.’”

In 2012, Landau—then 84—recalled this to me in an interview for the Times of London as the moment he knew he wanted to save his career.

Starring roles as a Hitchcock villain or in the TV series of Mission: Impossible were lost to the mists of time. Agents had told Landau he was “finished.”

“It was frustrating. I knew what I was able to do, I was at the height of my powers but no one was giving me the chance,” the charming and wry Landau told me. And so his fightback began, not simply for recognition and glory, but also just to act—his true and abiding passion.

The career of the Academy Award-winning actor—who died Sunday at 89 after unexpected complications during a stay at the UCLA Medical Center—spanned many generations, many peaks and troughs, and many characters on our TV and cinema screens.

Perhaps you remember him as Rollin Hand in the original TV series of Mission: Impossible (for which Landau won a TV Golden Globe for Best Male TV Star in 1968), or—as it is for me—the tunic-wearing silver fox Commander John Koenig in the 1970s drama Space: 1999.

Yet, as that 1984 nadir showed, Landau’s career was uneven to say the least, going from playing the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)—which he later told me he deliberately played as a gay man—to a role in the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.

The serious movie awards came later in Landau’s life, after he had roused himself from the mid-1980s doldrums.

First came a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, and an Oscar nomination, for his performance as a financier in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Landau’s second Oscar nomination came for playing a shifty and panicked adulterer in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

He finally won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as horror movie star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), and he won the corresponding Golden Globe for that too, as well as many other laurels. Landau also amassed six Emmy nominations, including one for appearing in Entourage.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Landau told me of winning the Oscar. There are wonderful pictures of him kissing the statuette and giving a humble salute as he holds it. That humility, and a gentleness, was evident the day we met.

“I felt I knew Lugosi,” Landau told me. “Like him I had worked for good directors and terrible directors. I went thinking I was going to have a nice dinner and probably be miserable at the end of the night.”

“When I win you can see Samuel L. Jackson [nominated for Pulp Fiction] say ‘Shit,’ probably the most honest reaction one can have.”

When I met Landau in 2012, it was connected to Burton’s Frankenweenie, the first black and white animation shot in 3-D, which had just been released.

In what was a remake of a 1984 Burton short film, Landau voiced a science teacher who, by electrocuting a dead frog into life, inspired a 10-year-old Victor Frankenstein in ’60s American suburbia to reanimate his beloved dead dog.

Naturally, chaos of the comic and fairly gruesome kind ensued, all the magnificently weird visions of Burton distilled into a unique format; the 3-D element making it particularly eye-popping for cinema audiences.

Landau was happy: Though he was a well-known name, his fame was not of the supersonic kind enjoyed by his one-time best friend James Dean or his one-time paramour Marilyn Monroe. Landau was a link to old Hollywood, and after a career that zig-zagged around film and TV, in his later years he finally gained critical lionization.

And so, of course, Landau had tales to tell in a nondescript conference room of his agent Dick Guttman’s Los Angeles office, all in his magnificently gravelly voice. He was both warm, wonderful company and a candid raconteur.

Meeting Marilyn

He had met Monroe—she a couple of years his senior—under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York.

“She was there because she was dissatisfied,” Landau told me. “People perceived her as a Hollywood blonde bimbo. She was very needy and would go from being on top of her game to absolutely bereft of any self-belief or confidence. She see-sawed between those two personalities.”

Landau told me that when he and Monroe would go to the theater, she would change her outfits many times. “We’d never see the first act of the play.”

I asked if he desired her. “She was terrific… I don’t talk about those things,” he replied quietly.

Did he have a relationship with her, I asked.

“I had a relationship with her. It was just before Arthur [Miller, the playwright; he and Monroe married in 1956]. It was an interesting relationship, I look at it very differently than the way I did then. She was incredibly attractive but very difficult.”

I asked how he coped with that. “You can’t. That’s why I didn’t.” It lasted “several months,” he said, he not able to negotiate the poles of her personality. “Yeah, you didn’t know which one would show up in the middle of something.” I asked if he ended the relationship. “I did, by becoming more busy.” Was she upset by that? “I don’t know, probably. I didn’t want to upset her.” Because she was fragile? “Yes. I busied myself with other things.”

After the relationship ended, Landau and Monroe saw each other “a couple of times in passing” in New York and Los Angeles, he told me.

I asked Landau if he was in love with Monroe.

“I don’t know if I was in love with her or fascinated by her or flattered by her. She was incredibly attractive and fun to be with much of the time. When she wasn’t she wasn’t. I mean, that was the problem. She could get very withdrawn.”

Did he want to marry her, I asked. “No, no. It was almost a form of purgatory. I never knew who [ie, which Marilyn] I was going to be with.”

Landau told me he had been changing planes in Rome in 1962 when he read that Monroe had died.

“I was heartbroken. As the mystery unfolded I was more and more shocked. It didn’t seem possible that she killed herself intentionally. It was possible she took more barbiturates than necessary, just losing count, or possibly it was foul play. Nobody knows.”

‘Martin, You Have a Circus Going on Inside You’

Landau grew up in Brooklyn: his father had been a machinist; his mother, he told me, took him to the movies. He was sensitive, and loved acting and drawing. When he listened to radio dramas like The Shadow with Orson Welles, it “allowed you to create a set of images and characters.”

Landau studied art at the Pratt Institute and became a cartoonist for the Daily News in New York. (“Tim and I work well together,” Landau said of Burton. “I understand him, we both started as cartoonists.”)

Landau quit that job after seeing a friend act and deciding he could do better. He attended the Actors Studio (Steve McQueen was a fellow student), and later he became its artistic director, tutoring such stars as Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. He headed the Hollywood branch until his death.

Hitchcock saw Landau’s stage performance in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night and cast him in North by Northwest (1959), saying: “Martin, you have a circus going on inside you. Obviously if you can do that part you can play this little trinket.”

In the movie, Landau’s character wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s because, Landau decided, his character “had to be gay; she was interfering with his relationship” with James Mason’s character. “I made it subtle; I knew in big cities they’d get it. Hitch loved it. People told me: ‘Don’t play gay. It will affect your career.’ I said: ‘I’m an actor.’”

He recalled to me meeting his friend James Dean—“he was a farm boy, I was a New Yorker”—at an open casting call. Dean asked him how the process worked, and Landau, observing how different they looked, deduced they would not compete for roles.

Regarding Monroe and Dean’s early deaths, Landau told me: “It’s so hard because everyone else I’ve known who died got old—they’re both frozen in time.”

Landau was married to the actress Barbara Bain from 1957 until their divorce in 1993: a “natural end,” he told me.

They had met at an acting class, and Space: 1999 fans will remember they starred opposite each other in that show. (They had first starred alongside one another in Mission: Impossible.) Landau is survived by Bain and their two daughters Susie and Juliet.

Facing Ageism in Hollywood

Landau cherished his late-career renaissance. “Ageism is something that does exist,” he told Deadline in April. “As a young actor, I was working much more readily, and being offered more things. I don’t like to do what I call ‘the grunters’—a character who sits at a table and grunts, and young people make fun of. I turn a lot of those down. I like a character that is still alive, and is necessarily thinking, and either grows or diminishes, or whatever.”

As for never making the A-list, Landau seemed sanguine. “I think it would have held me back in a certain way,” he told me. “I played a wide variety of roles.” Others had “great careers and became major stars, but I played more things, had more fun, and I’m still doing it.”

Indeed he was. After Frankenweenie came more roles: in The Red Maple Leaf with Kris Kristofferson and James Caan; Remember, alongside Christopher Plummer; and, most recently, The Last Poker Game opposite Paul Sorvino. Three other projects are listed at various stages of production on Landau’s IMDb page: Herstory, Without Ward, and Nate & Al.

‘An Actor’s Actor’

When it came time to say farewell that day in 2012, Landau told me he had greatly enjoyed our conversation. He suggested to me and to Guttman that, should he ever come to write it, would I like to work on his memoir with him?

Nothing ever came to pass, although I was extremely heartened to read tonight, via Deadline, that Landau had been working on a memoir at the time of his death. A documentary, appropriately titled An Actor’s Actor: The Life of Martin Landau, is also apparently in development.

Landau was both quite the storyteller and also a true actor's actor, so both projects, should they reach fruition will be fascinating. Landau believed in acting, rather than stardom, passionately—as both craft and vocation. That might explain his longevity and late-in-life triumphs. It certainly illuminates why it was an honor and pleasure to meet and spend time with Martin Landau.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/02/martin-landau-on-his-relationship-with-marilyn-monroe-playing-gay-for-hitchcock-and-his-oscars-triumph/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/martin-landau-on-his-relationship-with-marilyn-monroe-playing-gay-for-hitchcock-and-his-oscars-triumph/

[allofbeercom]

Martin Landau on His Relationship With Marilyn Monroe, Playing Gay for Hitchcock, and His Oscars Triumph

For Martin Landau, the turning point came when he found himself watching the 1984 Academy Awards, “having a beer in my underwear, saying: ‘I should be there.’”

In 2012, Landau—then 84—recalled this to me in an interview for the Times of London as the moment he knew he wanted to save his career.

Starring roles as a Hitchcock villain or in the TV series of Mission: Impossible were lost to the mists of time. Agents had told Landau he was “finished.”

“It was frustrating. I knew what I was able to do, I was at the height of my powers but no one was giving me the chance,” the charming and wry Landau told me. And so his fightback began, not simply for recognition and glory, but also just to act—his true and abiding passion.

The career of the Academy Award-winning actor—who died Sunday at 89 after unexpected complications during a stay at the UCLA Medical Center—spanned many generations, many peaks and troughs, and many characters on our TV and cinema screens.

Perhaps you remember him as Rollin Hand in the original TV series of Mission: Impossible (for which Landau won a TV Golden Globe for Best Male TV Star in 1968), or—as it is for me—the tunic-wearing silver fox Commander John Koenig in the 1970s drama Space: 1999.

Yet, as that 1984 nadir showed, Landau’s career was uneven to say the least, going from playing the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)—which he later told me he deliberately played as a gay man—to a role in the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.

The serious movie awards came later in Landau’s life, after he had roused himself from the mid-1980s doldrums.

First came a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, and an Oscar nomination, for his performance as a financier in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Landau’s second Oscar nomination came for playing a shifty and panicked adulterer in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

He finally won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as horror movie star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), and he won the corresponding Golden Globe for that too, as well as many other laurels. Landau also amassed six Emmy nominations, including one for appearing in Entourage.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” Landau told me of winning the Oscar. There are wonderful pictures of him kissing the statuette and giving a humble salute as he holds it. That humility, and a gentleness, was evident the day we met.

“I felt I knew Lugosi,” Landau told me. “Like him I had worked for good directors and terrible directors. I went thinking I was going to have a nice dinner and probably be miserable at the end of the night.”

“When I win you can see Samuel L. Jackson [nominated for Pulp Fiction] say ‘Shit,’ probably the most honest reaction one can have.”

When I met Landau in 2012, it was connected to Burton’s Frankenweenie, the first black and white animation shot in 3-D, which had just been released.

In what was a remake of a 1984 Burton short film, Landau voiced a science teacher who, by electrocuting a dead frog into life, inspired a 10-year-old Victor Frankenstein in ’60s American suburbia to reanimate his beloved dead dog.

Naturally, chaos of the comic and fairly gruesome kind ensued, all the magnificently weird visions of Burton distilled into a unique format; the 3-D element making it particularly eye-popping for cinema audiences.

Landau was happy: Though he was a well-known name, his fame was not of the supersonic kind enjoyed by his one-time best friend James Dean or his one-time paramour Marilyn Monroe. Landau was a link to old Hollywood, and after a career that zig-zagged around film and TV, in his later years he finally gained critical lionization.

And so, of course, Landau had tales to tell in a nondescript conference room of his agent Dick Guttman’s Los Angeles office, all in his magnificently gravelly voice. He was both warm, wonderful company and a candid raconteur.

Meeting Marilyn

He had met Monroe—she a couple of years his senior—under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York.

“She was there because she was dissatisfied,” Landau told me. “People perceived her as a Hollywood blonde bimbo. She was very needy and would go from being on top of her game to absolutely bereft of any self-belief or confidence. She see-sawed between those two personalities.”

Landau told me that when he and Monroe would go to the theater, she would change her outfits many times. “We’d never see the first act of the play.”

I asked if he desired her. “She was terrific… I don’t talk about those things,” he replied quietly.

Did he have a relationship with her, I asked.

“I had a relationship with her. It was just before Arthur [Miller, the playwright; he and Monroe married in 1956]. It was an interesting relationship, I look at it very differently than the way I did then. She was incredibly attractive but very difficult.”

I asked how he coped with that. “You can’t. That’s why I didn’t.” It lasted “several months,” he said, he not able to negotiate the poles of her personality. “Yeah, you didn’t know which one would show up in the middle of something.” I asked if he ended the relationship. “I did, by becoming more busy.” Was she upset by that? “I don’t know, probably. I didn’t want to upset her.” Because she was fragile? “Yes. I busied myself with other things.”

After the relationship ended, Landau and Monroe saw each other “a couple of times in passing” in New York and Los Angeles, he told me.

I asked Landau if he was in love with Monroe.

“I don’t know if I was in love with her or fascinated by her or flattered by her. She was incredibly attractive and fun to be with much of the time. When she wasn’t she wasn’t. I mean, that was the problem. She could get very withdrawn.”

Did he want to marry her, I asked. “No, no. It was almost a form of purgatory. I never knew who [ie, which Marilyn] I was going to be with.”

Landau told me he had been changing planes in Rome in 1962 when he read that Monroe had died.

“I was heartbroken. As the mystery unfolded I was more and more shocked. It didn’t seem possible that she killed herself intentionally. It was possible she took more barbiturates than necessary, just losing count, or possibly it was foul play. Nobody knows.”

‘Martin, You Have a Circus Going on Inside You’

Landau grew up in Brooklyn: his father had been a machinist; his mother, he told me, took him to the movies. He was sensitive, and loved acting and drawing. When he listened to radio dramas like The Shadow with Orson Welles, it “allowed you to create a set of images and characters.”

Landau studied art at the Pratt Institute and became a cartoonist for the Daily News in New York. (“Tim and I work well together,” Landau said of Burton. “I understand him, we both started as cartoonists.”)

Landau quit that job after seeing a friend act and deciding he could do better. He attended the Actors Studio (Steve McQueen was a fellow student), and later he became its artistic director, tutoring such stars as Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. He headed the Hollywood branch until his death.

Hitchcock saw Landau’s stage performance in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night and cast him in North by Northwest (1959), saying: “Martin, you have a circus going on inside you. Obviously if you can do that part you can play this little trinket.”

In the movie, Landau’s character wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s because, Landau decided, his character “had to be gay; she was interfering with his relationship” with James Mason’s character. “I made it subtle; I knew in big cities they’d get it. Hitch loved it. People told me: ‘Don’t play gay. It will affect your career.’ I said: ‘I’m an actor.’”

He recalled to me meeting his friend James Dean—“he was a farm boy, I was a New Yorker”—at an open casting call. Dean asked him how the process worked, and Landau, observing how different they looked, deduced they would not compete for roles.

Regarding Monroe and Dean’s early deaths, Landau told me: “It’s so hard because everyone else I’ve known who died got old—they’re both frozen in time.”

Landau was married to the actress Barbara Bain from 1957 until their divorce in 1993: a “natural end,” he told me.

They had met at an acting class, and Space: 1999 fans will remember they starred opposite each other in that show. (They had first starred alongside one another in Mission: Impossible.) Landau is survived by Bain and their two daughters Susie and Juliet.

Facing Ageism in Hollywood

Landau cherished his late-career renaissance. “Ageism is something that does exist,” he told Deadline in April. “As a young actor, I was working much more readily, and being offered more things. I don’t like to do what I call ‘the grunters’—a character who sits at a table and grunts, and young people make fun of. I turn a lot of those down. I like a character that is still alive, and is necessarily thinking, and either grows or diminishes, or whatever.”

As for never making the A-list, Landau seemed sanguine. “I think it would have held me back in a certain way,” he told me. “I played a wide variety of roles.” Others had “great careers and became major stars, but I played more things, had more fun, and I’m still doing it.”

Indeed he was. After Frankenweenie came more roles: in The Red Maple Leaf with Kris Kristofferson and James Caan; Remember, alongside Christopher Plummer; and, most recently, The Last Poker Game opposite Paul Sorvino. Three other projects are listed at various stages of production on Landau’s IMDb page: Herstory, Without Ward, and Nate & Al.

‘An Actor’s Actor’

When it came time to say farewell that day in 2012, Landau told me he had greatly enjoyed our conversation. He suggested to me and to Guttman that, should he ever come to write it, would I like to work on his memoir with him?

Nothing ever came to pass, although I was extremely heartened to read tonight, via Deadline, that Landau had been working on a memoir at the time of his death. A documentary, appropriately titled An Actor’s Actor: The Life of Martin Landau, is also apparently in development.

Landau was both quite the storyteller and also a true actor's actor, so both projects, should they reach fruition will be fascinating. Landau believed in acting, rather than stardom, passionately—as both craft and vocation. That might explain his longevity and late-in-life triumphs. It certainly illuminates why it was an honor and pleasure to meet and spend time with Martin Landau.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/02/martin-landau-on-his-relationship-with-marilyn-monroe-playing-gay-for-hitchcock-and-his-oscars-triumph/