Martin Landau

Martin Landau was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, and began his career as a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator for the New York Daily News before turning to acting, gaining admission to the Actors Studio in 1955 in the same class as Steve McQueen, out of thousands of applicants for two available spots. He built a career across film, television, and theatre spanning more than six decades. His breakthrough film role came in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), in which he played Leonard, the coolly menacing right-hand man to James Mason's villain Phillip Vandamm, opposite Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill; Landau later said in interviews that he deliberately played Leonard's devotion to Vandamm with homosexual undertones, an unusually bold choice for a mainstream 1959 studio film. He became widely known to television audiences as Rollin Hand in the original Mission: Impossible series (1966–1969). After a fallow period in the 1970s and early 1980s, Landau staged a celebrated career resurgence, receiving consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor for Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), before winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at age sixty-six for his portrayal of the aging horror star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). He died in 2017 in Los Angeles. Landau is remembered as a defining product of the Actors Studio's psychologically detailed approach, and his sly, unsettling performance in North by Northwest remains one of the most quietly influential supporting turns in a Cary Grant film.