R.I.P. Eli Wallach (1915-2014)

The news came in late tonight that Eli Wallach, the beloved star of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, passed away on June 24, 2014. No details are currently available about the cause of death. He was 98 years old.

Although audiences may be most familiar with Eli Wallach’s scene-stealing performance as Tuco Ramirez – a.k.a. “The Ugly” – in Sergio Leone’s classic western, his career spanned over 60 years with award-winning performances in films, television and the stage. He was bestowed with an honorary Academy Award in 2010 for “a lifetime’s worth of indelible screen characters.”

Eli Wallach made his cinematic debut in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll playing Silva Vacarro, who seduces the 19-year-old title character into betraying her husband, Karl Malden. But he was originally cast in the role of Angelo Maggio in 1953’s From Here to Eternity, a part which was later hastily recast with Frank Sinatra, who would go on to win an Oscar for his performance. The claims that Sinatra used his Mafia connections to get the part would later be dramatized in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, resulting in a very unfortunate incident with a horse head. Wallach would appear in a later entry of Coppola’s series, The Godfather Part III, in 1990, the same year he co-starred in the sequel to another Oscar-winning picture, The Two Jakes, a sequel to Chinatown.

Over the course of his career Eli Wallach would turn up in many classic and less-than-classic movies, including The Misfits (classic), The Magnificent Seven (classic), How to Steal a Million (classic), The Deep (classic), The Associate (less-than-classic), The Holiday (less-than-classic) and Circle of Iron (less-than-classic, but at least you got to see him bath naked in a cauldron of oil in the middle of a desert). His final feature film performance was in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, although his IMDb page lists an as yet unreleased short film, The Train, on his resume as well.

Wallach’s extensive television work also included such popular series as “Kojak,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Nurse Jackie” and the Adam West “Batman” series, in which he played the supervillain Mr. Freeze over two memorable episodes.

Eli Wallach was a fierce performer who brought more intensity to his roles than could ever be predicted. He was a funny man, a talented actor and a respectable Hollywood personality who will be dearly missed. Our thoughts go out to his wife of 66 years, actress Anne Jackson, and their three children.

This Week in Film News – Week Ending 06/27/14

William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.