Martin Landau dead: Character actor who starred in Ed Wood dies aged 89

Popular performer won an Oscar for performance as Bela Lugosi in 1995 Tim Burton biopic and also appeared in Mission: Impossible, North By Northwest and Crimes and Misdemeanours

Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his publicist.

Landau starred on the hit CBS suspense drama Mission: Impossible as Rollin Hand, a versatile covert-operations agent, from its debut in 1966 until 1969. After the show’s third season he and Barbara Bain, his wife and co-star, left because of a contractual dispute. But the series had served its purpose. Because Landau’s character was a master of disguise, morphing into a different character every week, casting people began to think of him for a variety of roles.

Almost two decades later, after some lean years, Landau enjoyed a career revival in feature films. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), he was cast as the title character’s amiable hustler of a business partner, challenging the Big Three automakers in the 1940s. The film brought him an Academy Award nomination. He received another nomination the next year for Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours, in which he played a successful, upstanding ophthalmologist and family man who gets away with the arranged murder of his mistress.

Then, in 1994, he played Lugosi, the faded horror star — now elderly, poor and morphine-addicted — in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Johnny Depp played Wood, the enthusiastic but inept 1950s filmmaker, who befriends and employs Lugosi. Landau’s performance earned him the Oscar and the Golden Globe for best supporting actor, as well as awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Screen Actors Guild.

Martin Landau was born on June 20, 1928, in Brooklyn, the son of Morris Landau, a machinist, and the former Selma Buchanan. He attended James Madison High School and Pratt Institute, and originally planned to be an illustrator.

He worked at The Daily News in New York for five years, but eventually quit to pursue a career in the theatre.

Landau married Bain in 1957. They had two daughters and divorced in 1993.

He is survived by his daughters, Susie Landau Finch and Juliet Landau, and a granddaughter.

The New York Times