First George Romero ...

[Billy_Kinetta]

... now Martin Landau.

Martin Landau, Oscar Winner for 'Ed Wood,' Star of Original 'Mission: Impossible,' Dies at 89

 

[Indeependent]

... now Martin Landau.

Martin Landau, Oscar Winner for 'Ed Wood,' Star of Original 'Mission: Impossible,' Dies at 89

Couldn't act for shit.
Rest In Peace.

 

[Billy_Kinetta]

... now Martin Landau.

Martin Landau, Oscar Winner for 'Ed Wood,' Star of Original 'Mission: Impossible,' Dies at 89

Couldn't act for shit.
Rest In Peace.

His Lugosi was dead-on.

 

[S.J.]

Never liked him much as an actor but hey, R.I.P.

 

[toobfreak]

I really enjoyed him in the Outer Limits, Mission Impossible and Space 1999 among many other things. Always sad to see another luminary of stage and screen pass away. We have really lost a lot of great stars of both screen, stage and music in the past 12 months. The world I know is quickly disappearing.

 

[ThunderKiss1965]

I remember him from Space 1999. Loved that show when I was a kid.

 

[IsaacNewton]

George Romero.

Bets on how many people at the viewing will watch to see if he rises out of the casket and starts seeking human flesh. Not a 'great' director but certainly unique and worthy of note. I remember watching Night of the Living Dead at the theater as a kid and it scared the living out of me. Of course that was back when zombies walked real slow but still somehow caught people. Now they're like Zombie Freeze and ten thousand of them will run you down without breaking a sweat. Of note, in both Psycho and Night of the Living Dead Bosco chocolate syrup was used for the fake blood. Both were in black and white so color didn't matter.

And now you know...the rest of the story.

Martin Landau I remember most from Space 1999, a show ahead of it's time at the time. And 1999 seemed a thousand years in the future. Now it's long gone. I was watching Soylent Green recently and the Soylent Corporations books had the dates 2015-2019 on them. Right now. When that came out in what, 1971, that date seemed a time that would never come.

And here we are and the movie came true we are eating people now and it's called spam.

 

[toobfreak]

A few other interesting points of Landau’s life:

A former newspaper cartoonist, Landau turned down the role of Mr. Spock on the NBC series Star Trek, which went to Leonard Nimoy (who later effectively then replaced Landau on Mission: Impossible after Trek was canceled).

Landau also was an admired acting teacher who taught the craft to the likes of Jack Nicholson. And in the 1950s, he was best friends with James Dean and, for several months, the boyfriend of Marilyn Monroe.

Landau was born in Brooklyn in 1928. At age 17, he landed a job as a cartoonist for the New York Daily News, but he turned down a promotion and quit five years later to pursue acting.

“It was an impulsive move on my part to do that,” Landau told The Jewish Journal in 2013. “To become an actor was a dream I must’ve had so deeply and so strongly because I left a lucrative, well-paying job that I could do well to become an unemployed actor. It’s crazy if you think about it. To this day, I can still hear my mother’s voice saying, ‘You did what?!’ ”

In 1955, he auditioned for Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and he and Steve McQueen were the only new students accepted that year out of the 2,000-plus aspirants who had applied.

Landau met Bruce Geller, the eventual creator of Mission: Impossible, when he invited the writer to an acting class. Barbara Bain (his future wife) was in the class as well, and Geller wrote for them the parts of spies Rollin Hand and Cinnamon Carter. Landau earned an Emmy nomination for each of his three seasons on the series.

He could have starred in another series.

“I turned down Star Trek. It would’ve been torturous,” he said during a 2011 edition of the PBS documentary series Pioneers of Television. “I would’ve probably died playing that role. I mean, even the thought of it now upsets me. It was the antithesis of why I became an actor. I mean, to play a character that Lenny (Nimoy) was better suited for, frankly, a guy who speaks in a monotone who never gets excited, never has any guilt, never has any fear or was affected on a visceral level. Who wants to do that?”