Alan Arkin - # 307

Alan Arkin, Oscar Winner for ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ Dies at 89

 He was number 307 on the list.

Alan Arkin, an Oscar-winning actor for “Little Miss Sunshine” with a body of work that spans seven decades of stage and screen acting, died June 29 at his home in Carlsbad, Calif. He was 89.

Arkin’s sons confirmed his death in a statement to People, writing, “Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man. A loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather, he was adored and will be deeply missed.”

Arkin, who was known for projecting a characteristically dry wit but could play tragedy with equal efficacy, won his Oscar for his supporting performance in the indie comedy “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2007; he scored an encore nomination for his punchy and profane turn in Ben Affleck’s best picture winner “Argo.” Arkin picked up two earlier nominations in his film career, for “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” in 1967 and for “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” in 1969.

More recently, Arkin received back-to-back Primetime Emmy Award nominations in outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series for his performance in the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method,” in which he starred alongside Michael Douglas. Arkin received four additional Emmy nominations (across other categories) earlier in his career.

Beyond his screen career, Arkin began in entertainment as a stage performer, serving as an early member of the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago before making his Broadway debut in “From the Second City” in 1961. Two years later, he scored a Tony Award for starring in Joseph Stein’s comedy “Enter Laughing.”

In “Argo” he played Lester Siegel, the Hollywood veteran who was recruited to produce a fictional sci-fi film whose production would provide cover for the rescue of American hostages in Iran. Siegel, wrote Pete Hammond in his review, even “goes to the extreme of announcing the project in a Variety ad and article. ‘If I am going to be making a fake movie, I want to have a fake hit,’ says Lester, played to amusing perfection by Arkin.”

In “Little Miss Sunshine,” Arkin played the foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting grandfather Edwin. The San Francisco Chronicle said: “The cast is so perfect that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the roles. Arkin’s spontaneity gives the impression that he’s improvising.”

Arkin was an actor whose gifts were recognized early. After his Tony in 1963, he earned his first Emmy nomination, for the “ABC Stage 67” episode “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski,” in 1967, the same year he earned his first Oscar nomination. Arkin never really left television despite the success of his film career. His next Emmy nomination came in 1987 for the Holocaust-themed CBS telepic “Escape From Sobibor”; the third was in 1997 for a guest appearance on “Chicago Hope” and another in 2003 for telepic “The Pentagon Papers.”

Remarkably, Arkin earned his first Oscar nomination for his first credited feature performance. Norman Jewison’s “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” was a Cold War comedy in which a Soviet sub runs aground on a New England island; Arkin played the leader of the Russian party set to scout out the area. Hilarity ensues as Russians and Americans make wild encounters. The New York Times noted that it was Arkin’s debut film and said he gave “a particularly wonderful performance.”

Not all the critics were impressed with his performance in the thriller “Wait Until Dark,” in which he played a psycho terrorizing a blind Audrey Hepburn, but the role increased his profile in Hollywood and has maintained a strong reputation to this day; next he played Inspector Clouseau in a movie of that name, with Peter Sellers nowhere in sight.

Then in 1969 he earned his second Oscar nomination with Carson McCullers adaptation “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” In a review that was otherwise critical of the film, the New York Times said Arkin’s performance as the deaf-mute Singer is “extraordinary, deep and sound. Walking, with his hat jammed flat on his head, among the obese, the mad, the infirm, characters with one leg, broken hip, scarred mouth, failing life, he somehow manages to convey every dimension of his character, especially intelligence.”

He played a Puerto-Rican father in the comedy “Popi,” Yossarian in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of “Catch-22” and the title character in Neil Simon’s adaptation of his own play “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” Seeking a different kind of experience, he appeared as a Puerto-Rican police detective alongside James Caan in Richard Rush’s crime drama “Freebie and the Bean.”

In 1976, Arkin starred as Sigmund Freud in the Herbert Ross-directed Sherlock Holmes riff “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” with a top-flight cast that included Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave.

Arkin directed his first film in 1971, helming the satire “Little Murders” with Jules Feiffer adapting his own play and Elliot Gould starring. He returned to the director’s chair for the somewhat more accessible 1977 comedy “Fire Sale,” with Arkin and Rob Reiner starring. He also helmed some episodic television and a TV movie.

He closed out the 70’s with one of that decade’s funniest film comedies: “The In-Laws,” starring opposite Peter Falk. Arkin was also the executive producer. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote: “I was laughing so hard at ‘The In-Laws,’ a wonderful new comedy of errors… that after a while I was crying. Then I was wiping my eyes. Then I forgot to take any more notes.” As for Arkin and Falk, Maslin said, “It is theirs, and not their children’s, match that has been made in heaven.”

The early 1980s were a fallow period for Arkin. But he was the best thing in 1985 Mordecai Richler adaptation “Joshua Then and Now.” The New York Times lauded the “hilarious, scene-stealing performance by Alan Arkin as the hero’s fast-talking father.” He then reunited with Peter Falk for the John Cassavetes-directed comedy “Big Trouble.”

Though he did not play one of the central characters in Tim Burton’s 1990 film “Edward Scissorhands,” Arkin is still remembered for his performance as Winona Ryder’s father that Rolling Stone characterized as “marvelously wry.”

In the early ’90s he appeared in the epic “Havana,” starring Robert Redford, and played the old codger who dreamed up the device that enables the hero to become “The Rocketeer.” Arkin was part of the starry cast populating the screen adaptation of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

In the late ’90s the actor did some fine, interesting, varied work. Arkin played the psychiatrist of the professional killer played by John Cusack in “Grosse Pointe Blank” (the New York Times said, “Alan Arkin is an enormous treat as Martin’s psychiatrist, who can’t conceal his problem of being afraid of his homicidal patient”). He was the dignified diplomat at the center of Bruno Barreto’s Brazilian kidnap drama “Four Days in September,” the cop on the trail of the genetically imperfect Ethan Hawke in “Gattaca,” the paterfamilias always moving his family around to avoid paying rent in “Slums of Beverly Hills.”

In Jill Sprecher’s indie film “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” (2001), Arkin had a particularly excellent scene opposite Matthew McConaughey. In 2007, the same year he appeared in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Arkin played a senator without political courage in the film “Rendition.”

The next year he appeared in “Sunshine Cleaning,” a sort-of black comedy about a pair of sisters who clean up crime scenes. Also in 2008, he played the Chief in the film adaptation of “Get Smart” that starred Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway. The next year, still continuing to show his range as an actor, Arkin appeared with Robin Wright Penn in Rebecca Miller’s seriocomic “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” a small but ambitious film in which, the New York Times said, “Together Ms. Penn and Mr. Arkin create a portrait of a marriage in which you sense the intertwining crosscurrents of devotion, boredom, anger and gratitude.”

In 2012, the same year he appeared in “Argo,” Arkin starred along with Al Pacino and Christopher Walken in “Stand Up Guys,” about a trio of old mobsters who get the gang back together for one last hurrah.

As for television, Arkin was among the many actors who did some time on “Sesame Street” in the early 1970s. He tried series television with the brief 1987 ABC sitcom “Harry” (in which he starred with then-wife Barbara Dana, among others) and more successfully in the new century with Sidney Lumet’s well-written, well-acted courthouse drama “100 Centre Street.” Reviewing the latter, the New York Times lauded “Alan Arkin’s superbly real, understated portrayal of Joe Rifkind, a thoughtful judge so prone to giving criminals every chance at redemption that his nickname is Let-’em-Go Joe.”

He appeared in a number of TV movies over the years, including the 1978 telepic “The Defection of Simas Kudirka” and, much later, “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself,” in which he played a world-weary mercenary.

Even after his film career had launched, Arkin occasionally guested on series, doing an arc on “St. Elsewhere” in 1983 as the husband of a stroke victim played by Piper Laurie; appearing in 1997 on “Chicago Hope” (on which son Adam was a series regular); and guesting on “Will & Grace” in 2005.

Alan Wolf Arkin was born in Brooklyn on March 26, 1934, but the family moved to Los Angeles when he was 12.

His father, David Arkin, an artist and writer, lost his job as a teacher amid the paranoia of the Red Scare. Alan started taking acting classes before he reached puberty. He attended Los Angeles City College for two years, then Bennington College from 1953-54, dropping out to form the Tarriers, a folk-music group in which he was the lead singer.

In 1955, he recorded an album for Elektra titled “Folksongs — Once Over Lightly.” With other members of the Tarriers, he wrote a version of the Jamaican calypso folk song “The Banana Boat Song” that was a big hit in 1956. He was already a young actor finding work where he could.

Arkin first appeared on the big screen, uncredited, in his role as lead singer of the Tarriers in 1957’s “Calypso Heat Wave.”

He made his Off Broadway debut as a singer in “Heloise” the following year. At the Compass Theatre in St. Louis, which he had joined, he caught the eye of stage director Bob Sills, which led to Arkin becoming an original member of Chicago’s Second City troupe together with Paul Sand.

He wrote the lyrics and sketches for his Broadway debut, the musical “From the Second City.” After winning his Tony in 1963, he returned to Broadway the next year in Murray Schisgal’s “Luv,” directed by Mike Nichols.

Arkin made his directorial stage debut with the Off Broadway hit “Eh?” (1966), which introduced the world to Dustin Hoffman. He further directed Off Broadway’s “Little Murders” (1969) and “The White House Murder Case” (1970). On Broadway, he directed the original production of Neil Simon’s extremely successful comedy “The Sunshine Boys,” which ran for 538 performances beginning in 1972. He directed the unsuccessful Broadway musical “Molly” in 1973 and was absent from the Rialto for 27 years until 2000, when he directed Elaine May’s play “Taller Than a Dwarf”; Matthew Broderick and Parker Posey starred.

Arkin was married three times, the first to Jeremy Yaffe, the second to actress Barbara Dana.

All three of his sons became actors, but Adam Arkin also became a director of episodic television. Speaking to Variety about how he came to direct, Adam Arkin said, “I often joke about the fact that when other kids were being taken to baseball games and sporting events and fishing trips, my father was taking me to see silent Russian films.”

In addition to his three sons — Adam and Matthew, with Yaffe; and Anthony Dana Arkin, with Dana — Alan Arkin is survived by third wife, Suzanne Newlander Arkin, whom he married in 1999.

 

Filmography

Film

Year     Title            Role            Other notes

1957            Calypso Heat Wave            Tarriers lead singer       

1963    That's Me            Un­known        Short film; also writer

1966    The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming            Lt. Rozanov          

The Last Mohican            Mr. Ableman            Short film; also writer

1967    Woman Times Seven            Fred            Segment: The Suicides

Wait Until Dark            Roat

Harry Roat Jr.

Harry Roat Sr. 

1968            Inspector Clouseau            Inspector Jacques Clouseau         

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter            John Singer  

1969    Popi            Abraham Rodriguez    

The Monitors            Garbage man in commercial            Cameo

People Soup            Adam            Short film; also writer and director

1970    Catch-22        Capt. John Yossarian

1971    Little Murders            Lt. Miles Practice            Also director

1972            Deadhead Miles            Cooper           

Last of the Red Hot Lovers            Barney Cashman         

1974    Freebie and the Bean            Det. Sgt. Dan "Bean" Delgado           

1975    Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins            Gunny Rafferty            Aka Rafferty and the Highway Hustlers

Hearts of the West    Burt Kessler

1976    The Seven-Per-Cent Solution            Sigmund Freud           

1977    Fire Sale      Ezra Fikus    Also director

1979    The In-Laws            Sheldon S. Kornpett, D.D.S. Also executive producer

The Magician of Lublin            Yasha Mazur 

1980    Simon            Prof. Simon Mendelssohn   

1981            Improper Channels            Jeffrey Martley           

Chu Chu and the Philly Flash            Flash   

Full Moon High            Dr. Brand  

1982    The Last Unicorn            Schmendrick (voice)    

1983    The Return of Captain Invincible            Captain Invincible         

1985    Joshua Then and Now            Reuben Shapiro           

Bad Medicine            Dr. Ramón Madera           

1986    Big Trouble            Leonard Hoffman       

1987    Escape from Sobibor            Leon Feldhendler     

1990    Coupe de Ville Fred Libner 

Edward Scissorhands            Bill Boggs  

Havana Joe Volpi   

1991    The Rocketeer            A. "Peevy" Peabody          

1992            Glengarry Glen Ross            George Aaronow         

1993    Indian Summer            Unca Lou Handler    

So I Married an Axe Murderer            Police Captain           

Samuel Beckett Is Coming Soon    The Director            Also director

1994    North            Judge Buckle 

1995    Picture Windows            Tully            Segment: Soir Bleu

The Jerky Boys: The Movie  Ernie Lazarro           

Steal Big Steal Little     Lou Perilli   

1996    Heck's Way Home            Dogcatcher     

Mother Night            George Kraft   

1997    Grosse Pointe Blank            Dr. Oatman           

Four Days in September            Charles Burke Elbrick  

Gattaca            Det. Hugo   

1998    Slums of Beverly Hills            Murray Samuel Abromowitz    

1999    Jakob the Liar Max Frankfurter      

2000            Magicians         Milo            Direct-to-video

2001            America's Sweethearts            Wellness Guide

Thirteen Conversations About One Thing    Gene   

2004    Eros            Dr. Pearl

Hal            Segment: Equilibrium

Noel     Artie Venizelos         

2006    Little Miss Sunshine            Edwin Hoover

Firewall            Arlin Forester          

The Novice            Father Benkhe

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause            Bud Newman         

Raising Flagg            Flagg Purdy  

2007            Rendition        Senator Hawkins          

2008            Sunshine Cleaning            Joe Lorkowski       

Get Smart            The Chief   

Marley & Me            Arnie Klein   

2009    The Private Lives of Pippa Lee            Herb Lee     

City Island            Michael Malakov          

2011    Thin Ice       Gorvy Hauer  

The Change-Up       Mitchell Planko Sr.       

The Muppets            Tour Guide   Cameo

2012    Argo            Lester Siegel  

Stand Up Guys            Richard Hirsch 

2013    The Incredible Burt Wonderstone            Rance Holloway         

In Security            Officer Riggs   

Grudge Match            Louis "Lightning" Conlon

2014    Million Dollar Arm            Ray Poitevint          

2015    Love the Coopers            Bucky 

2017    Going in Style Albert Garner 

2019    Dumbo            J. Griffin Remington       

2020            Spenser Confidential            Henry Cimoli 

2022            Minions: The Rise of Gru      Wild Knuckles (voice) 

 

Television

Year     Title            Role            Notes

1964    East Side/West Side            Ted Miller            Episode: "The Beatnik and the Politician"

1966    ABC Stage 67            Barney Kempinski            Episode: "The Love Song of Barney Kempinski"

1970–1971            Sesame Street   Larry            4 episodes, with then-wife Barbara Dana as Larry's wife Phyllis

1978    The Other Side of Hell      Frank Dole     TV movie

The Defection of Simas Kudirka            Simas Kudirka

1979    Carol Burnett & Company            Himself            Episode #1.2

1980    The Muppet Show            Himself            Episode: "Alan Arkin"

1983    St. Elsewhere            Jerry Singleton            Episodes: "Ties That Bind", "Lust En Veritas" & "Newheart"

1985    Faerie Tale Theatre            Bo            Episode: "The Emperor's New Clothes"

The Fourth Wise Man            Orontes           TV movie

1986    A Deadly Business            Harold Kaufman

1987    Harry            Harry Porschak            7 episodes

Escape from Sobibor            Leon Feldhendler            TV movie

1988            Necessary Parties            Archie Corelli  TV movie

1993            Cooperstown   Harry Willette TV movie

Taking the Heat            Tommy Canard TV movie

1994            Doomsday Gun            Col. Yossi

1995    Picture Windows            Tully            Miniseries

1997            Chicago Hope Zoltan Karpathein            Episode: "The Son Also Rises"

1999    Blood Money Willy "The Hammer" Canzaro            TV movie

2001            Varian's War   Bill Freier

2001–2002            100 Centre Street            Joe Rifkind 10 episodes

2003    The Pentagon Papers  Harry Rowen TV movie

And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself Sam Drebben            TV movie

2005    Will & Grace   Marty Adler            Episode: "It's a Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad World"

2015–2016            BoJack Horseman            J. D. Salinger (voice)            4 episodes

2017    Get Shorty  Eugene            Episode: "The Yips"

2018–2019            The Kominsky Method            Norman Newlander            16 episodes

 

Theatre

Year     Title            Role            Notes

1961    From The Second City            Performer      Royale Theatre, Broadway

1963    Enter Laughing            Performer - David Kolowitz            Henry Miller's Theatre,

Broadway

1964    Luv            Performer - Harry Berlin   Booth Theatre, Broadway

1966    Hail Scrawdyke!            Director           Booth Theatre, Broadway

1972    The Sunshine Boys            Director            Broadhurst Theatre, Broadway

1973    Molly            Director           Alvin Theatre, Broadway

2000    Taller Than a Dwarf            Director            Longacre Theatre, Broadway