He demonstrated his admirable acting talent most often in supporting roles rather than leading and it is therefore understandable that the entireness of his opus is greater than the individual nevertheless successful roles that were often somewhat overshadowed by the protagonists



One of the great American character actors whose career spanned for more than six decades, Eli Wallach played his last film roles in 2010 at the age of ninety five – he was the Old man in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and Julie Steinhardt in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps by Oliver Stone. He had many roles on television but for him theatre was a far more important medium. He studied theatre acting with the great German theatre director Erwin Piscator, and then became one of the first students of Lee Strasberg in the Actors’ Studio thus becoming one of the founder of the most successful American acting studio.

In the meantime in 1945, he began performing on Broadway, and in 1951 received the most prestigious American theatre award Tony for his role in Tennessee Williams’ Tattooed Rose. He most often acted in Williams’ plays and refused film offers even when he was on the verge of bankruptcy with his wife Anne Jackson, also theater actress and partner to whom he was married from 1948 until his death. In 1953, he was given a chance to change his situation – at the test shooting for the role of Angelo Maggio in the film From Here to Eternity, he thrilled the director Fred Zinnemann. Nevertheless, he turned the role down in order to star in Tennessee Williams’ play Camino Real directed by Elia Kazan, whom he considered to be the best theater director in the world

Zinnemann’s film received eight Oscars, and one of them was for the category Best Supporting Actor played by Frank Sinatra instead of Wallach who had refused that role. However, it was Kazan, who had a great opinion of Wallach based on his theatre career, finally managed to lure Wallach to accept a film role. It was the film Baby Doll based on Tennessee Williams’ screenplay and Wallach had the role of the Sicilian Don Juan and was awarded the BAFTA award as the Most Promising Newcomer, and was also nominated for the Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actor. The number of film roles that followed prove the directors and producers’ confidence in his acting talent. It is unusual that he was rarely awarded for his individual roles, while he was awarded the life-time achievement Oscar and several other life-achievement awards. It seems that the juries were under the impression that Wallach plays very diverse roles with such ease and almost no effort at all that he in fact simply plays himself.

Only when we start to compare these very different characters he has played, do we come to the realization on how much skill and effort was put into the naturalness of his diverse roles. In the beginning of his film career after his role in Baby Doll, he portrayed a serial killer the film noire The Line Up (1958) by Don Siegel, then the Mexican scoundrel in The Magnificent Seven (1960) by John Sturges. In the westerns he impressively portrayed completely different characters – for example in the omnibus How the West Was Won (1962) as opposed to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) by Sergio Leone. In the meantime, he was impressive in a completely different manner as Guido in The Misfits (1961) by John Huston or General in Lord Jim (1965) by Richard Brooks, while in the attractive romantic comedy with elements of action How to Steal a Million (1966) by the great William Wyler he proved that he is a master of that genre as well. He had an even more expressively comical role in the second film shown within this program – Movie, Movie (1970) by Stanley Donnen, humorous parody of double film program for wide audiences from the beginning of the 20th century in America.
Later he starred more in crime dramas, often portraying gangsters, and demonstrated his admirable acting talent most often in supporting roles rather than leading and it is therefore understandable that the entireness of his opus is greater than the individual nevertheless successful roles that were often somewhat overshadowed by the protagonists. (Tomislav Kurelec)