Oscar-wining actor Martin Landau died on Saturday at the age of 89 in Los Angeles. Landau died at the UCLA Medical Center on July 14 following a “short hospitalisation”, his publicist Dick Guttman said in a statement on Sunday.
Landau, who has worked in films, television and on stage, has collaborated with top directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1995 for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood.
Landau won another Oscar in 1988 for his in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. “You know, I’ve always felt, pound for pound, I’m one of the best guys around; but you get stuck in people’s eyes in a certain way, and it takes an imaginative director who will look at you and realise you can play different kinds of parts because you are an actor,” Landau had told The New York Times in 1988. “I don’t like to sound immodest but I believe in what I can do.”
Landau was known for his roles in films like North by Northwest, Tucker: The Man and His Dream. He also won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Rollin Hand in popular TV series Mission: Impossible.
Born to Jewish parents in in New York’s Brooklyn borough, Landau had joined the New York Daily News as a cartoonist at the age of 17. However, a few years later he quit the job for acting. In 1957, he married his Mission: Impossible co-star Barbara Bain, whom he was with till 1993. He is survived by two daughters.
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