Eli Wallach himself, who died yesterday at the age of 98, wanted to be remembered in his epitaph, in honor of his character in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, one of the mythical Westerns in which he worked, such as The Seven Magnificent or How the West Was Won.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, directed by Sergio Leone in 1966, gave Wallach his most remembered role, that of Tuco, the shrewd Mexican bandit who fights alongside the characters of Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef to get hold of a shipment.
Wallach decided to go to the casting for the film when he found out that Leone was looking for someone very ugly. He landed the role and when the Italian director told him that he was going to make a spaghetti western in Almería, he replied that it sounded like a pizza Margherita to him.
That was the third part of Leone's trilogy, in which he had previously shot A Fistful of Dollars and Death Had a Price. In addition to that film, Wallach, with more than half a century of profession behind him, shot three other films of this style in the Almeria desert: The Four Truhanes (1968), Long Live Death...Yours (1972) and El Blanco, the Yellow and the Black (1975).
Method Actor
Born on December 7, 1915, in New York to Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland, he was one of the most recognizable faces at the Actor's Studio, the acting school where introspective skills and internal character creation were instilled.
After making his Broadway debut in 1945 and winning a Tony Award in 1951 for The Rose Tattoo, Wallach was impressed in his first film role. Elia Kazan gave him the opportunity in Baby Doll (1956), the big screen version of Tennessee Williams' work, where he shared scenes with Karl Malden.
That role earned him his only nomination for the Golden Globes, in the category of best supporting actor. However, he always fled from recognition.
"Having critics praise your work is like the hangman telling you that you have a nice neck," he said of it. Shortly after, two of his best-known works came to him, that of the evil Calavera under the orders of John Sturges in The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Conquest of the West (1962), along with Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and James Stewart.
Wallach remained very active in the 1960s, when he signed titles such as How to Steal a Million (1966), by William Wyler, or Mackenna's Gold (1969), by J. Lee Thompson, and even appeared in the famous series Batman television, where he played Mr. Freeze with great reception.
"I still receive many more emails for that role than for almost the entire rest of my career," revealed the interpreter himself a few years ago. After the 1970s it became more difficult for him to find prestigious work, but he stayed afloat despite the poor quality of the titles he shot in the 1980s when he turned more to television roles.
Secondary luxury in its maturity
It was the time in which little by little he ended up becoming one of those luxury supporting roles in Hollywood, in productions such as The Two Jakes (1990), by Jack Nicholson, or the third part of The Godfather (1990), in which gave life to Don Altobello, that gangster so fond of sweets.
Spanish cinema also had his presence in Two Much (1995), by Fernando Trueba, in which he played the father of Antonio Banderas, and 37 years after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly he reunited with Clint Eastwood in Mystic River (2003), where he gave life to the owner of a liquor store.
In the past decade, his appearances in films such as Keeping the Faith (2000), by Edward Norton, The Hoax (2006), by Lasse Hallstrom, and The Holiday (2006), along with Cameron Díaz, Jude Law and Kate Winslet also stand out.
Additionally, in 2005 he released his autobiography, The Good, The Bad And Me: In My Anecdotage. Wallach, whose last appearance on the big screen could be seen in The Ghost and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, both in 2010, leaves behind a wife (Anne Jackson, whom he married in 1948) and three children.
Despite being refractory to awards and flattery, Wallach had the satisfaction of receiving that same year the honorary Oscar from the Film Academy along with other ugly ones such as Francis Ford Coppola and Jean-Luc Godard.
