Karl Malden, Actor Who Played the Uncommon Everyman, Dies at 97

Karl Malden, the Academy Award-winning character actor who for more than 60 years brought an intelligent intensity and a homespun authenticity to roles in theater, film and television, from “A Streetcar Named Desire” to “The Streets of San Francisco,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.

His family announced his death to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which Mr. Malden served as president from 1989 to 1992. The announcement said family members were present when he died of natural causes in his home in the Brentwood section.

Mr. Malden was perhaps the ideal Everyman. He realized early on that he lacked the physical attributes of a leading man; he often joked about his blunt features, particularly his crooked, bulbous nose, which he had broken several times while playing basketball in school. But he was, he once said, determined “to be No. 1 in the No. 2 parts I was destined to get.”

He wound up playing everything from a whiskey-swigging cowboy to a prison warden, from an Army drill sergeant to the combative priest opposite Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”

On Broadway he appeared with Mr. Brando in a legendary production of Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire,” then repeated the role in a film version that brought him an Oscar. On film he won memorable parts in a host of other major productions, including “Ruby Gentry,” “Fear Strikes Out” and “Patton,” in which he played Gen. Omar Bradley.

On television, too, he found wide popularity — as the gruff Lt. Mike Stone in “The Streets of San Francisco” and as a long-running pitchman for American Express travelers’ checks in the 1970s. His signature line, “Don’t leave home without them” — delivered as he peered intently from under the brim of his “San Francisco” fedora — became a national catch phrase.

Mr. Malden’s Broadway career began in 1937 with a small part in “Golden Boy,” the Clifford Odets drama about a doomed prizefighter; it reached its peak a decade later, in 1947, when he appeared in two major plays, both directed by Elia Kazan.

He began the year in “All My Sons,” Arthur Miller’s searing drama about a profiteering manufacturer (played by Ed Begley) who sells faulty parts to the Army during World War II and then pins the blame on his partner. Mr. Malden played the partner’s disillusioned son. It was Mr. Miller’s first Broadway hit and a triumph for Mr. Kazan and the cast.

A few months later, Mr. Malden won a plum role in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The production made a star of Mr. Brando, who created the role of the brooding, hard-drinking mechanic Stanley Kowalski. The cast also included Kim Hunter as Stella, Stanley’s long-suffering wife, and Jessica Tandy as Stella’s fragile, haunted sister, Blanche DuBois. Mr. Malden played Mitch, Blanche’s hopelessly inept suitor.

The production won rave reviews and Mr. Malden, Mr. Brando and Ms. Hunter repeated their roles in the 1951 film version, also directed by Mr. Kazan, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche. Mr. Malden’s performance brought him an Academy Award as best supporting actor.

Three years later, he received an Oscar nomination for his role as a militant priest in “On the Waterfront,” Budd Schulberg’s drama of dockside brutality. Again, Mr. Kazan directed and Mr. Brando starred, as a battered former prizefighter persuaded to oppose the venal leadership of the longshoremen’s union.

Mr. Malden continued performing on the stage in Broadway revivals of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” with John Garfield and Mildred Dunnock, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” in which he starred as the flinty patriarch of a hardscrabble New England farm.

In 1957 he played the lead role in “The Egghead,” a drama by Mr. Kazan’s wife, Molly, about a liberal professor who defends a former student charged with Communist sympathies. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, was cool to what he saw as a strained thesis play, but he lauded “one of those excellent Malden performances in which thoughtful timing, the poised stance, the inquiring look into the faces of other actors yield a winning impression of homeliness and sincerity.”

When “The Egghead” closed after only 21 performances, Mr. Malden turned to films. For a while he shuttled between New York and Hollywood, but finally, after co-starring with Mr. Brando in the 1961 western “One-Eyed Jacks,” he bought a house in Los Angeles and moved west with his wife, Mona, and two daughters, Mila and Carla.

In December, the couple celebrated their 70th anniversary. In addition to his wife, Mr. Malden is survived by his daughters as well as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912. His father, Petar Sekulovich, was a Serbian immigrant who worked in a steel mill and later delivered milk; his mother, the former Minnie Sebera, came from Bohemia, later to become part of the Czech Republic. As a young man, Mladen helped his father deliver milk in Gary, Ind., and spent three years working in a steel mill.

At 22, having acquired a taste for the theater and determined to make his own life far from the mills, he set off for Chicago with a few hundred dollars in savings to study acting at the Goodman Theater. He earned tuition by building sets and eventually met the woman he would marry, an aspiring actress named Mona Greenberg.

He graduated from the Goodman in 1937 but found himself back in Gary driving a milk truck, much as his father had. Luck came along in a letter from Robert Ardrey, a playwright he had met at the Goodman. Mr. Ardrey invited him to New York to try out for a part in his latest play. That play was never produced, but Mr. Malden also auditioned for the director Harold Clurman and Mr. Kazan, who were casting “Golden Boy” for the Group Theater. He wound up with “four lines in the third act,” he later wrote, but it was a significant initiation.

The Group Theater and “Golden Boy” began an enduring friendship between Mr. Malden and Mr. Kazan. It was Mr. Kazan, in fact, who persuaded the young actor to change his name to something less daunting. So Mladen became Malden, and he took the name Karl from one of his grandfathers.

He also took classes with the Group Theater in the early 1940s and later with the Actors Studio, but he did not regard himself as one of the studio’s Method actors. “I do have a method, of course,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “When Do I Start?” He said it was “any method that works.”

After serving in the Army in World War II, Mr. Malden played a drunken sailor in a Clurman and Kazan production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1946 play “Truckline Cafe.”

Mr. Malden had made a handful of movies before “Streetcar,” including “Kiss of Death” (1947), “The Gunfighter” (1950) and “Halls of Montezuma” (1950). But his Oscar-winning performance in “Streetcar” made Mr. Malden one of Hollywood’s leading character actors.

He went on to portray the wealthy man Jennifer Jones marries to spite Charlton Heston in “Ruby Gentry” (1952); the policeman in Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess” (1953); and the slow-witted husband of a child bride in “Baby Doll” (1956), another Tennessee Williams story directed by Mr. Kazan.

In 1962 he was the doggedly loving boyfriend of Rosalind Russell in “Gypsy,” and in 1970 he won critical praise for his stalwart General Bradley in “Patton,” starring George C. Scott.

With his movie career tailing off in the early 1970s, Mr. Malden reluctantly tried his hand at television. “I felt that I had started at the bottom in the theater and worked my way up for 20 years, then started at the bottom with bit parts in films and worked my way up for another 20 years,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t feel like starting at the bottom again.”

Still, he agreed to star in a new detective series on ABC, “The Streets of San Francisco.” Making its debut in 1972, the show was an immediate hit and ran through June 1977. The sidekick to Mr. Malden’s Lieutenant Stone was Michael Douglas, who left the show in 1976.

He appeared in a few more movies in the 1980s, notably as the stepfather of Barbra Streisand’s call girl in Martin Ritt’s film “Nuts.” There were television shows, including the 1980 NBC series “Skag,” in which he reached back to his roots to play a hard-bitten foreman in a steel mill. In the 1984 NBC drama “Fatal Vision,” he played a man who belatedly realizes that his son-in-law is a murderer. His performance brought him an Emmy award.

In one of his last appearances, in “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro,” a 1989 made-for-television movie, he was cast as Leon Klinghoffer, the American Jew who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on a Mediterranean cruise ship. And in 2000, in the first season of “The West Wing,” he played a priest one last time, counseling President Jed Bartlet on the death penalty.

In 1989 Mr. Malden began his term as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization responsible for the Academy Awards. Ten years later he used that standing in Hollywood to urge the academy’s board to award an honorary Oscar to his old friend and mentor Elia Kazan.

The recommendation was bitterly opposed by those who had never forgiven Mr. Kazan for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and informing on colleagues who had been members of the Communist Party. But the board voted its approval.

“If anyone deserved this honorary award because of his talent and body of work,” Mr. Malden said after the vote, “it was Kazan.”

Mr. Malden never forgot his beginnings as a son of immigrants, nor did he lose his perspective. Not long after his Oscar-winning work with Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar,” he referred to himself as probably “the only ex-milkman Vivien ever kissed in a movie.”

In an interview nearly a half-century later, he said he thought of an actor’s work as “digging ditches.”

“Sometimes they’re deep and sometimes they’re shallow,” he said, “but we keep digging them.”

A CORONER may have ruled out foul play but Michael Jackson is destined to join the list of celebrity icons, not least Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, whose deaths have attracted countless conspiracy theories.

Doctors are awaiting the results of toxicology tests carried out on the singer's body, amid claims he was injected with the powerful painkiller Demerol - which can cause cardiac arrest - by his doctor shortly before he died.

The toxicology tests are expected to take up to eight weeks.

Other reports suggest Jackson was addicted to a cocktail of painkillers and anti-depressants and may have suffered an accidental drug overdose, similar to actor Heath Ledger.

The fact that detectives want to re-interview Jackson's personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray, who witnessed his collapse, following claims that police were initially unable to trace the medic, only added weight to the suspicion surrounding his death. However, Los Angeles police have insisted Murray is not under criminal investigation.

Murray, a cardiologist who practises in California, Nevada and Texas, was initially questioned shortly after the singer's death. A spokeswoman for Los Angeles police said the doctor was not under suspicion, but his car could contain "medications or other evidence that may assist the coroner in determining the cause of death".

Jackson's family is now demanding a second autopsy on the star, claiming unanswered questions remain about his death.

Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has been counselling the family, said Jackson's relatives were upset the official cause of death might not be known for weeks. He said the family also wanted answers from Murray. Although coroners ruled out foul play, they gave no cause of death, saying toxicology tests could take weeks.

Jesse Jackson said the family had many questions of their own for the doctor. "When did the doctor come? What did he do? Did they inject him, if so with what," Jesse Jackson said. "He owes it to the family and to the public to say: These were the last hours of Michael's life and here's what happened.'"

The LA county coroner Jackson's has already returned the body to his family earlier. They are now said to be making funeral arrangements.

Coroner's investigator Brian Elias said Jackson's relatives told his office they wanted a second autopsy carried out.

It's understood Jackson's family want to know more about the role AEG, the concert promoter, was playing in his life in the months leading up to his death.

They also want to know more about the role of his advisers and representatives, who they believe were put in place by the promoter.

In May, Jackson's London concerts were rescheduled amid reports he was battling with skin cancer, which his publicists denied. There has been speculation the stress of preparing for a 50-date tour at London's O2 arena, combined with years of hostile publicity, could have contributed to Jackson's death.

Dr Tohme Tohme, an adviser to Jackson, said he never saw pills or other medication at Jackson's rented home. "I'm not aware of him taking anything," Tohme said.

Celebrity website TMZ.com, which broke the story of Jackson's death, cited an interview with an unidentified "close member" of the Jackson family, reporting that the singer was injected with Demerol, a drug similar to morphine, about half-an-hour before he went into cardiac arrest.

TMZ said Jackson referred to Demerol as a "health tonic" and would have a doctor inject him because he didn't like needles and couldn't administer shots himself.

It reported that Jackson received the shot at 11.30am on the day of his death, while other reports said he was taking a cocktail of painkillers and other drugs, including Dilaudid and Vicodin, Soma, a muscle relaxant, Xanax, a sedative, and anti-depressants Zoloft and Paxil.

Writer and doctor Deepak Chopra, a friend of Jackson, recalled how the singer approached him in a bid to get prescription drugs after his trial on child abuse charges.

He said: "In 2005 he asked me for a prescription and I started to get curious about whether he was taking prescription medications and narcotics. The more I probed, the more he denied it, but then he admitted he was taking a lot of prescription medication for pain."

Jackson had been blighted by a string of past health problems in the past, including a degenerative heart problem.

***

He gave us the freedom to express ourselves in a way the world had never seen before'THE MOURNING: By Carolyn Churchill

ACROSS the world, from Paris to Peru, from Los Angeles to London, they gathered yesterday to pay tribute to their icon. Some held candlelit vigils, others danced in the streets in celebration of the King of Pop.

In Mexico City, Michael Jackson imitators took turns busting Jackson-like moves on the steps of the country's iconic Angel of Independence monument and later sat arm-in-arm holding candles and posters covered with photo collages and heartfelt messages.

"I love you Michael Jackson, King of Pop," said one. "I will love you forever."

A candlelit vigil was held in Shanghai, while in Nigeria, a radio presenter broke down live on air after hearing the news. Japanese TV channels switched to special programming showcasing his career and French fans gathered at the Notre Dame in Paris to remember their music idol.

In Los Angeles, members of the black community gathered in Leimert Park - where they met after Martin Luther King died. Amid singing, dancing and performance, there were plenty of tears as people remembered the singer.

Cathy Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist from LA's Watts district, explained that, during the fight for civil rights, the community would gather at the park. After Dr King was shot, the area became LA's memorial to the civil rights leader. In recent years the deaths of Isaac Hayes and Luther Vandross have also brought the community out.

Youngblood, 58, explained Jackson's place in black American culture: "Michael Jackson represented the community spirit. He is the one who gave us the freedom to express ourselves in a way the world had never seen before. He was able to help us bridge the gap and communicate with other ethnic groups and cultures. His music transcended all ethnicity."

It was one of a number of spontaneous memorials to take place in the city on a day in which Jackson's death was finally beginning to sink in.

On Hollywood Boulevard, police put up barricades to control thousands of fans who filed past Jackson's star on the Walk of Fame to honour the child prodigy who became one of the top singers of all time with an estimated 750 million albums sold, his name on the concrete barely visible among the flowers, cards and stuffed toys left by fans.

Tiffany Younger, 50, was there to honour Jackson's memory. "I just felt a significant urge to come down and be amongst other people," she said.

She said she had gone through a range of emotions since hearing the news of Jackson's death and had since contemplated his lasting legacy.

"I have been laughing, I have been crying, I have been remembering. It has been a blur of emotions. I'm still in shock," she said. "But his life is to be celebrated. He gave so much to people, he touched everyone."

In the Philippines, prison security consultant Byron Garcia planned a tribute for Jackson with inmates performing an encore of a famous video in which they do a synchronized dance to Thriller. The video has had 23.4 million hits on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Michael Jackson's "number one understudy", who has been impersonating him for the best part of two decades, said he intended to "keep the memory alive, keep his look alive, keep what he stands for alive".

Scorpio, who said Jackson was "a friend of mine, in all senses of the word," expressed his shock at the singer's death: "I fainted when I heard it. I dropped to my knees and started crying. I'm broken down right now, just the thought that he isn't here anymore."

But he vowed not to hang up the white glove just yet. "I'm going to sing, I'm going to dance, I'm going to share my love with other people so that they know what Michael Jackson is really about. Because that is what he was about, just loving the world - that is all he wanted."

A surge in sales of Jackson's music is set to propel his greatest hits album to the top of the UK album chart today, six years after his last number one hit. The Official Charts Company said it expects to see "up to half a dozen" of the singer's other albums in the Top 75.

Fans who bought tickets for any of his 50 planned shows at the O2 via eBay and PayPal will receive full refunds. eBay will return sales commission to sellers when they refund buyers, the online retailer said.

A spokesman for AEG Live, which organised the concerts, said full refund information for all those with tickets would be released early next week.

But even as the world reacted to his death, behind the scenes experts said that the singer's creditors would be arming themselves to fight for a share of his estate. Despite reports that Jackson's finances were in a parlous state, media lawyer Mark Stephens, of Finer Stephens Innocent, said that there would be enough money to pay off the singer's debts and leave a "sizeable chunk" for his three children.

Although the singer was reportedly $500 million in debt he had assets worth a reported $1 billion, much of which will be in a protected trust fund for his children, said Stephens.

The trust fund, commonly set up at the start of a star's career to preserve their earnings once their popularity wanes, is likely to contain valuable assets such as the words and music of the Beatles' back catalogue.

The beneficiaries of the cash locked in trust will be decided on by the trustees but are generally children and family. "Despite what we've heard about his finances, he died solvent," Stephens said. "There will be a fairly sizeable chunk of change left for the children."

But he said there could be a legal bid to break the trust and access the funds by creditors. "Interested parties will be arming themselves with lawyers even before the funeral."

***

Why we mourn: the loss of an idol and a drama fed by tehnologyBy Carolyn Churchill

IT has been an outpouring of grief like no other in the history of music. They flocked to the singer's home in LA, the Motown Historical Museum in Detroit and the O2 arena in London - anywhere with a link to their hero.

Such public mourning takes place "at that level rarely", according to Dr Cynthia McVey, head of psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University, but the sheer strength in numbers of Jackson's fan base resulted in a united sense of grief for millions of his fans.

"Jackson is a worldwide figure. If fans feel connected to a person and admire this person, there is idolatry," she said. "When the person dies the fans can feel bereft. They have lost their hero, their focus of admiration and they want to share that with like-minded people."

For decades, musicians have prompted such feelings and in death their fans have come together. The day after Elvis Presley died, thousands of fans gathered to file past his body as it lay in state at Graceland in Memphis. Even today, more than 30 years after his death, fans still make the pilgrimage to his iconic mansion.

In 1980 people rushed to the Dakota apartment building in New York after reports emerged that John Lennon had been shot. Fans, many of whom were overcome with grief, brought candles and turned the pavement into a shrine.

But it was the death of Princess Diana which sparked a new sense of shared mourning. Thousands of bouquets and teddy bears were left at Kensington Palace and condolence books were signed across the world. More than one million people lined the route of her funeral cortege and the service was estimated to have been watched by more than 2.5 billion people worldwide.

In Britain, so often seen as a "stiff upper lip" society, Diana's death made it acceptable to unite in grief in public for the first time.

"Public displays of emotion have become more accepted than they used to be," said McVey. "Certainly in Britain after Diana died there was an outpouring of emotion and collective public response to it which was exceptional. It may have broken down some barriers and somehow made it acceptable."

But although public mourning may now be more acceptable, McVey added that it may still depend on the identity of the person. "It was acceptable, perhaps because it was Diana. Some people may feel that it would not be appropriate for a pop singer."

Only three months ago, the death of a reality TV star sparked echoes of the scenes after the death of Princess Diana and raised questions about the so-called "Diana effect".

Thousands of people flocked to Essex for the funeral of Jade Goody. But some commentators labelled it as merely "wailing hysteria", an opportunity for many to wallow in one family's loss.

It is likely that thousands will want to pay their respects at Jackson's funeral. But before then, the internet has offered another outlet for their grief. Fans have blogged their memories, paid their condolences and watched candelit vigils from thousands of miles away.

McVey said the technology could also help "feed the drama" of people's grief. "If people are feeling sad and want to talk about how fantastic he was, they need to find somebody like-minded to discuss it with and that is where the use of the internet comes into play.

"People feed off each other's emotional reactions, so it can feed that shared distress. From that point of view, I think it hypes it up and feeds the drama of it."

***

Why we laugh: confusion, fear of emotion ... and because we're BritishBy Jasper Hamill

When Michael Jackson died, it didn't take long for drama to turn to comedy - albeit a sick and dark type of comedy. Barely hours after the global media broke the story that captivated the world, wags began circulating cruel Jacko jokes by email, text message and Twitter, laughing at the life of that most peculiar of men.

But the sniggering turned to anger for at least one joker. Scots comedian Frankie Boyle resigned from writing his column at the Daily Record last week after an argument over an article in which he called Jackson a paedophile.

In a digital message to his "Facebook Friends", Boyle wrote: "Oh dear. Had to quit my Daily Record column over a moral disagreement. We disagreed over whether it was OK to make jokes about a dead child molester. Here is the whole column..."

In the unprinted column, he cracked several jokes that were considered too offensive for tabloid publication. One sentence said: An interesting attitude we have to paedophilia in this country: We don't want paedophiles round here! Unless they've really worked on their choreography..."

Although Boyle was not available for interview his agent, Hannah Chambers, indicated that she did not feel that the column would be seen as too controversial by the Scottish public and said: "Anyone that knows Frankie would expect this of him."

Media commentators feel that the Jacko jokes have circulated more quickly than the jokes about the deaths of high-profile celebrities in the past, partly due to the speed of online communication, but also due to the fact the popstar's life was a fertile inspiration for comics.

Popbitch, a scurrilous weekly gossip bulletin emailed to around 360,000 readers, published a compendium of Jackson gags the morning after his death.

Its editor, Camilla Wright, said: "Michael Jackson - the one we all loved and grew up with - died somewhere between 1993 and 2003. Jackson set his life up for us to gossip, joke and be shocked about. It was harder to find immediate comedic material in Princess Di's death."

When asked to detail why Jackson was funny, she said: "Shaving the chimp's arse, oxygen coffin, marrying Lisa Marie Presley, blonde children, Jesus Juice There is a lot of material."

But not everyone agrees with Boyle and Wright. Jackson has so-far received a rapturous send-off in the international media, who mostly seem to have downplayed the more controversial aspects of his life - although the tabloids are starting to swing into action, with sensational headlines and conspiracy theories about his death.

His fans - those that have had to watch their idol pilloried and mocked for years - are glad the self-styled King of Pop is finally getting a good reception and say that anyone who chooses to mock him is being cowardly by targeting someone who can no longer defend himself.

M att Blank, spokesperson for the Michael Jackson World Network, said: "If Michael Jackson was alive, he would have every right to sue someone like Frankie Boyle. It's very unfair to be mean to someone who can't defend themselves. In all honesty, coverage before and after his death has been very positive. The media have been representing him very well and it's nice to know that in these tragic circumstances, that he went out on a high sic. Considering that, it's a shame some people feel it's necessary to attack someone when they're dead."

So why do we feel the need to laugh at dead celebrities? According to Professor Cary Cooper, professor of psychology at Lancaster University and expert on stress, the jokers are confused.

They cannot juggle the competing images they have of Jackson - the King of Pop and the weirdo - and so crack jokes as a way of overcoming this ambivalence.

"People are confused about Michael Jackson. They knew he was a genius, but had trouble reconciling themselves with the things he got up to. The jokes are a way of people asking: How can I give all the plaudits and accolades to this man, when a little while ago I was saying this guy might be a bit dodgy when it comes to kids?'"

He added: "Secondly, some people don't do emotions. Some people would rather crack a joke than express their emotions, because when you joke you don't have to share an emotion."

Cooper went on to say he thought Britain had little appetite for Jackson jokes so soon after his death, although he had identified a difference between the "gushing" American eulogising and the more cautious response of the British media.

But Janey Godley, Scottish stand-up comedian, claimed that laughing at uncomfortable subjects was a very British trait, particularly in Scotland.