Eli Herschel Wallach ( EE-ly WOL-ək; December 7, 1915 – June 24, 2014) was an American film, television, and stage actor from New York City. Known for his character actor roles, his entertainment career spanned over six decades. He received a BAFTA Award, a Tony Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. He was also inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1988 and received the Academy Honorary Award in 2010.
Originally trained in stage acting, he garnered over 90 film credits. He and his wife Anne Jackson often appeared together on stage, eventually becoming a notable acting couple in American theater. Wallach initially studied method acting under Sanford Meisner and later became a founding member of the Actors Studio, where he studied under Lee Strasberg. He played a wide variety of roles throughout his career, primarily as a supporting actor. He won the Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actor in a Play for The Rose Tattoo (1951).
For his debut screen performance in Baby Doll (1956), he won a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer and a Golden Globe Award nomination. Among his other most famous roles are Calvera in The Magnificent Seven (1960), Guido in The Misfits (1961), Tuco ("The Ugly") in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Don Altobello in The Godfather Part III (1990). Other notable films include How the West Was Won (1962), Tough Guys (1986), The Two Jakes (1990), The Associate (1996), The Holiday (2006), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and The Ghost Writer (both 2010). He received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2007) and Nurse Jackie (2011).
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Early life and education
Eli Herschel Wallach was born on December 7, 1915, at 156 Union Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a son of Polish Jewish immigrants Abraham and Bertha Wallach (née Schorr) from Przemyśl. He had a brother and two sisters. He and his family were among only a few Jews in an otherwise Italian-American neighborhood. His parents owned Bertha's Candy Store. Wallach graduated in 1936 from the University of Texas with a degree in history. In a later interview, Wallach said that he learned to ride horses while in Texas, explaining that he liked Texas because "It opened my eyes to the word friendship... You could rely on people. If they gave you their word, that was it... It was an education."
Two years later he earned a master of arts degree in education from the City College of New York. He gained his first method acting experience at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City, where he studied under Sanford Meisner. There, according to Wallach, actors were forced to "unlearn" all their physical and vocal mannerisms, while traditional stage etiquette and "singsong" deliveries were "utterly excised" from his classroom.
Military service
Wallach's education was cut short when he was drafted into the United States Army in 1940. He served as a staff sergeant and medic in a military hospital in Hawaii and later was sent to Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Abilene, Texas, to train as a medical administrative officer. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he was ordered to Casablanca. Later, when he was serving in France, a senior officer noticed his acting career and asked him to create a show for the patients. He and his unit wrote a play called Is This the Army?, which was inspired by Irving Berlin's This Is the Army. In the comedy, Wallach and the other actors mocked Axis dictators, with Wallach portraying Adolf Hitler. Wallach was discharged as a captain following the war's end in 1945. He was awarded the Army Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic–Pacific Campaign Medal, the European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.
Career
Stage actor
Wallach took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School in New York City with the influential German director Erwin Piscator. He later became a founding member of the Actors Studio, taught by Lee Strasberg. There, he studied more method acting technique with founding member Robert Lewis, and with other students including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Herbert Berghof, Sidney Lumet, and his soon-to-be wife, Anne Jackson. Wallach became Marilyn Monroe's first new friend when she became a student at the Actors Studio, once insisting on watching him perform in The Teahouse of the August Moon from the backstage wings, simply to see up close how experienced actors perform a two-hour play. She also became friends with his wife, Anne Jackson, also studying at the Studio, and would visit the couple at their home and sometimes babysit their new child.
In 1945 Wallach made his Broadway debut and he won a Tony Award in 1951 for his performance alongside Maureen Stapleton in the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo. His other theater credits include Mister Roberts, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Camino Real, Major Barbara (in which director Charles Laughton discouraged Wallach's established method acting style), Luv, and Staircase, co-starring Milo O'Shea, which was a serious depiction of an aging homosexual couple. He also played a role in a tour of Antony and Cleopatra, produced by the actress Katharine Cornell in 1946. He exposed Americans to the work of playwright Eugène Ionesco in plays including The Chairs and The Lesson in 1958, and in 1961 Rhinoceros opposite Zero Mostel. He last starred on stage as the title character in Visiting Mr. Green.
The stage was where Wallach focused his early career. From 1945 to 1950 he and his wife, Anne Jackson, worked together acting in various plays by Tennessee Williams. The five years following, he continued only working on stage, not becoming involved in film work until 1956. During those years, however, they were generally having a hard time making ends meet. He recalls they were getting along on unemployment insurance and living in a one-room, $35 a month apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in the Village. When he did get offered early movie parts, he turned them down with no regrets, and very early in his career he explained his reasoning:
What do I need a movie for? The stage is on a higher level in every way, and a more satisfying medium. Movies, by comparison, are like calendar art next to great paintings. You can't really do very much in movies or in television, but the stage is such an anarchistic medium.
Film and television roles
Wallach's film debut was in Elia Kazan's controversial 1956 Baby Doll, for which he won the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) as "Most Promising Newcomer." Baby Doll was controversial because of its underlying sexual theme. Director Elia Kazan however, set explicit limits on Wallach's scenes, telling him not to actually seduce Carroll Baker, but instead to create an unfulfilled erotic tension. Kazan later explained his reasoning:
What is erotic about sex to me is the seduction, not the act ... The scene on the swing with Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker in Baby Doll is my exact idea of what eroticism in films should be.
Wallach went on to a prolific career as "one of the greatest 'character actors' ever to appear on stage and screen", notes Turner Classic Movies, acting in over 90 films. Having grown up on the "mean streets" of an Italian American neighborhood, and his versatility as a method actor, Wallach developed the ability to play a wide variety of different roles, although he tried not to get pinned down to any single type of character. "Right now I'm playing an old man", he said at age 84. But "I've been through all the ethnic groups, from Mexican bandits to Italian Mafia heads to Okinawans to half-breeds, and now I'm playing old Jews. Who knows?"
Noting this versatility as a character actor, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called him "the quintessential chameleon", with the ability to play different characters "effortlessly", and L.A. Times theater critic Charles McNulty saw Wallach's "power to illuminate" his various screen or stage personas as being "radioactive." The Guardian has written that "Wallach was made for character acting", and includes movie clips from some of his most memorable roles in a tribute to him.
In 1961, Wallach co-starred with Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable in The Misfits, Monroe's and Gable's last film before their deaths. Wallach never learned why he was cast in the film, although he suspected that Monroe had something to do with it. Its screenwriter, Arthur Miller, who was married to Monroe at the time, said that "Eli Wallach is the happiest good actor I've ever known. He really enjoys the work."
Some of his other films included The Lineup (1958); Lord Jim (1965) with Peter O'Toole; a comic role in How to Steal a Million (1966), again with O'Toole, and Audrey Hepburn; and as Tuco ("the Ugly") in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, followed by other Spaghetti Westerns, such as Ace High. At one point, Henry Fonda had asked Wallach whether he himself should accept a part offered to him to act in a similar Western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which would also be directed by Leone. Wallach said "Yes, you'll enjoy the challenge", and Fonda later thanked Wallach for that advice.
Personal life
Wallach was married to actress Anne Jackson, with whom he frequently shared the screen, from March 5, 1948, until his death on June 24, 2014. They had three children: Peter, Katherine and Roberta.
In 2008, Wallach lost sight in his left eye due to a stroke.
His niece is historian Joan Wallach Scott (daughter of his brother Sam). A.O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times, is his great-nephew.
Death
Wallach died on June 24, 2014, of natural causes at the age of 98. His body was cremated.
Katherine Wallach told The New York Times that Anne Jackson died on April 12, 2016, aged 90, at her home in Manhattan.
Filmography
Selected filmography:
