Karl Malden, an Academy Award-winning actor who excelled in plainspoken, working-class roles, including the awkward Mitch in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and a brave priest in “On the Waterfront,” died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. No cause of death was immediately disclosed. He was 97.
Malden’s bulbous nose and thinning hair made him one of the most familiar sights in movies and on television for five decades. In the 1970s, he became known to millions of viewers as a police veteran who partners with a young inspector played by Michael Douglas on “The Streets of San Francisco.”
The show led to Malden’s 21-year role as the trench coat-wearing pitchman for American Express who urged customers not to leave home without their traveler’s checks. He joked that this became his best-known part, despite his reputation as one of the most versatile actors in TV and film.
Malden was a steelworker before acting on Broadway. He made his greatest mark on Hollywood in the early 1950s as part of a group of New York theater stars — headed by actor Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan — who were trying to bring an unpredictable, realistic style of acting to audiences
“I hadn’t met anyone that non-actorish before, non-theater-like,” Kazan once said of Malden. “The minute I saw him, I knew he came from something. It turned out to be the steel mills, and it was a thing that was very important for a director, because you feel, ‘Here’s a person who can play difficult parts, rough parts, physical parts, who doesn’t get frightened easily, who’s all there when I need him.’ “
Kazan said Malden was a great player to have opposite Brando because he had the impression Malden could tell Brando to “go to hell” without being intimidated.
Kazan directed Malden and Brando in Tennessee Williams’s drama “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway in 1947 and then in the 1951 film version. Malden won the Oscar for his supporting role as Mitch, who romances an emotionally fragile Southern belle, the sister-in-law of Brando’s character, Stanley Kowalski. Jessica Tandy played the woman onstage and Vivien Leigh was in the film version.
Again working under Kazan, Malden was nominated for an Oscar in his role as the dockside priest who rallies a punched-out prizefighter (Brando) to stand against a corrupt union in “On the Waterfront” (1954). Malden brought actress Eva Marie Saint, whom he had known at an acting workshop in New York, to Kazan’s attention for what would be her movie debut and Oscar-winning role as Brando’s love interest.
Perhaps none of Malden’s films received as much publicity as “Baby Doll” (1956), based on two short plays by Tennessee Williams. The film, again with Kazan directing, gave Malden a rare chance for a leading role.
He played a devious Southern cotton gin operator desperate to consummate his marriage to a teenage bride (Carroll Baker). Eli Wallach plays his young rival in business and love who ultimately cuckolds Malden’s character.
Along with the plotline, the film’s provocative advertising showing Baker sucking her thumb and sleeping in a crib provoked outrage among Catholic groups. Cardinal Francis J. Spellman said ticket buyers were courting sin.
Malden pointed out that because the marriage between “Baby Doll” and her husband was not consummated “it was the lack of sex that got the picture banned by the Catholic Church.”
Malden directed one film, “Time Limit” (1957), about a Korean War court martial starring his friend Richard Widmark. The movie received positive reviews but Malden said he disliked the office politics required for a director and happily returned to a busy schedule of character roles, from the 1962 musical “Gypsy” to the 1964 John Ford western “Cheyenne Autumn.”
Mladen George Sekulovich, the son of Serbian immigrant laborers, was born March 22, 1912, in Chicago and raised in Gary, Ind. He changed his name in the late 1930s at Kazan’s urging, but Malden said he felt so guilty that he tried to insert the name Sekulovich wherever possible on film, whether on an office nameplate or shouted out to a fellow TV detective in “The Streets of San Francisco.”
Malden excelled in drama and athletics in high school. He twice broke his nose playing basketball, and the injuries left him resigned to never playing a romantic leading man.
“God knows I didn’t have a pretty face to help me get parts, so in order to stay in this profession, I realized early on that I’d better know my business,” he wrote in a 1997 memoir, “When Do I Start?” “I strived to be number one in the number two parts I was destined to get.”
He saved up $300 quickly by accepting the most dangerous jobs at steel mills and then talked his way into a scholarship at Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama in 1934.
He came to New York in 1937 and won a tryout with the Group Theater, then casting Clifford Odets’s drama “Golden Boy.” Through the show, in which he played a boxing manager, Malden met Kazan.
Malden spent the next decade working steadily onstage. During World War II, he was assigned by the Army to entertain troops in the Moss Hart show “Winged Victory.” He won wide acclaim after the war in Kazan’s 1947 staging of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” playing a man after revenge from a war profiteer.
Then came “Streetcar,” which propelled him to the front rank of character actors and led to his long Hollywood career. In Hollywood, Malden was cast as policemen in many of his early films, including Kazan’s “Boomerang!” (1947) and Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess” (1953).
He was particularly memorable as the cruel father of baseball player Jim Piersall (played by Anthony Perkins) in “Fear Strikes Out” (1957); the fire-and-brimstone reverend in Disney’s “Pollyanna” (1960); a sheriff who whips outlaw Brando in “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961); and an inflexible warden in “The Birdman of Alcatraz” (1962) with Burt Lancaster as his prisoner.
In “Patton” (1970), Malden played Gen. Omar Bradley to George C. Scott’s glory-seeking Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
Malden said he wanted to “really let go” at Scott in one scene where Patton overstepped his authority, but he was told by Bradley, the film’s technical adviser, to play the scene calmly.
Why would you react calmly, Malden asked Bradley himself.
“Because I’ve got one more star on my shoulder than he has,” Bradley said.
One of Malden’s favorite parts was in “Hotel,” a 1967 film based on an Arthur Hailey novel. In playing a hotel thief named Keycase, Malden said he relished the challenge of how “to make something with no dialogue come to life.”
He was nominated four times for an Emmy in “The Streets of San Francisco” and won for outstanding supporting actor in a limited series or a special for “Fatal Vision” (1984) as the father-in-law of a murderer. He continued to take occasional film and television parts, among them Barbra Streisand’s father in “Nuts” (1987) and a priest in an episode of “The West Wing.”
From 1989 to 1992, he was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and helped raise millions of dollars to build a new library and film research center. He received a Screen Actors Guild award for a lifetime of achievement in 2004.
Survivors include his wife of 70 years, former actress Mona Graham; two daughters, Mila and Carla; three granddaughters; and four great-grandchildren.
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