Veteran actor Martin Landau, whose versatile screen career stretched from the 1960s TV series Mission: Impossible to his Oscar-winning turn as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood , has died at 89, his publicist said.
Landau died on Saturday of unexpected complications during a hospital stay in Los Angeles, according to a statement issued by publicist Dick Guttman.
Screenwriter Joss Whedon said Landau’s turn as philandering eye doctor and brother of Jerry Orbach in Woody Allen’s 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors was “perfect”.
Landau got his start on Broadway in the 1950s, before a 1959 film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller North by Northwest .
“I had tea with Mr Hitchcock one afternoon and asked him how he could have cast me in that part, because what I was playing in [the play] Middle of the Night was so different,” Landau told the Los Angeles Times last year.
“’My dear Mah-tin,’” Landau said in impersonating the British filmmaker, “‘you have a circus going on inside you. If you can do that part in the play, you can do this little trinket of mine.’”
Landau’s film roles ranged from the grand to the quirky, from Cleopatra , to The Greatest Story Ever Told and Nevada Smith .
But it was not until 1994 that he scooped up the Best Supporting Actor Oscar playing declining horror film star Lugosi in his poor, elder years as a morphine addict in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood .
