1989–1999: Career resurgence
In the late 1980s, Landau made a career comeback, earning an Academy Award nomination for his role in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). He said he was grateful to the film's director, Francis Ford Coppola, for the opportunity to play a role he enjoyed: "I've spent a lot of time playing roles that didn't really challenge me," he said. "You want roles that have dimension. The role of Abe Karatz gave me that." He won the Golden Globe Award for his part in the film. In 1989, Landau appeared in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) The film is split into two stories: one humorous, one dark in nature. Landau starred in the darker storyline as Judah Rosenthal, a successful ophthalmologist who tries to prevent his mistress, played by Anjelica Huston, from revealing their affair to his wife (Claire Bloom). Landau's character confides his worries to patient and rabbi Sam Waterston as well as his mobster brother Jerry Orbach. Allen remembered of the cast that:
I just couldn't find anybody good for the part of Judah... He read it, and he was completely natural. It's an interesting thing. Of all the actors I've ever worked with, he gives expression to my dialogue exactly as I hear it. His colloquialisms, his idiom, his inflection is exactly correct. So of all the people who've ever read my lines, he makes them correct every time... One of the reasons for this must be that Martin Landau came from my neighborhood in Brooklyn, right near where I lived, only a few blocks away.
The film received critical acclaim, with Roger Ebert giving the film four stars, writing, The movie generates the best kind of suspense, because it's not about what will happen to people—it's about what decisions they will reach. We have the same information they have. What would we do? How far would we go to protect our happiness and reputation? How selfish would we be? Is our comfort worth more than another person's life? Allen does not evade this question, and his answer seems to be, yes, for some people, it would be.Landau received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for this performance, losing to Denzel Washington in Glory.
He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Ed Wood (1994), a biopic in which Landau plays actor Bela Lugosi. Landau researched the role of Lugosi by watching many old Lugosi movies and studying Lugosi's Hungarian accent, which contributed to Lugosi's decline in acting. "I began to respect this guy and pity him," said Landau. "I saw the humor in him. This, for me, became a love letter to him, because he never got a chance to get out of that. I got a chance to make a comeback in my career. And I'm giving him one. I'm giving him the last role he never got." Landau also received a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Saturn Award for the role, as well as accolades from a number of critics' groups.
Landau's film roles in the 1990s included a down-on-his-luck Hollywood producer in the comedy Mistress (1992) with Robert De Niro, and judges in the dramas City Hall (1995) with Al Pacino, Rounders (1998) with Matt Damon, B.A.P.S. (1997) with Halle Berry, and Ready to Rumble in 2000. He played Geppetto in The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996). Landau provided the voice of Scorpion for the first two seasons of the 1990s Spider-Man television series. Landau left the series after two seasons when he won the Academy Award and lacked time for the series; Richard Moll was recast as Scorpion. He played the part of Jacob, son of Isaac, in the TV miniseries Joseph, alongside Ben Kingsley as Potiphar and Paul Mercurio as Joseph.
