[Vision2020] Oscar-winning Actor Karl Malden Dies at 97

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (July 1, 2009) Los Angeles Times at:

http://tinyurl.com/mf4a5m

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Oscar-winning actor Karl Malden dies at 97

Malden starred in TV's 'The Streets of San Francisco' and made famous the
American Express catchphrase 'Don't leave home without it.' He appeared in
more than 50 films over his long career.
By Dennis McLellan

Karl Malden, one of Hollywood's strongest and most versatile supporting
actors, who won an Oscar playing his Broadway-originated role as Mitch in
"A Streetcar Named Desire," died today. He was 97.

Malden starred in the 1970s TV series "The Streets of San Francisco" and
was the longtime American Express traveler's-check spokesman, warning
travelers to not leave home without it. He died of natural causes at his
home in Brentwood, said his daughter Mila Doerner.

With his unglamorous mug -- he broke his bulbous nose twice playing sports
as a teenager -- the former Indiana steel-mill worker realized early on
the course his acting career would take.

"I was so incredibly lucky," Malden once told The Times. "I knew I wasn't
a leading man. Take a look at this face." But, he vowed as a young man, he
wasn't going to let his looks hamper his ambition to succeed as an actor.

In a movie career that flourished in the 1950s and '60s, Malden played a
variety of roles in more than 50 films, including the sympathetic priest
in "On the Waterfront," the resentful husband in "Baby Doll," the warden
in "Birdman of Alcatraz," the outlaw-turned-sheriff in "One-Eyed Jacks,"
the pioneer patriarch in "How the West Was Won," Madame Rose's suitor in
"Gypsy," the card dealerin "The Cincinnati Kid" and Gen. Omar Bradley in
"Patton."

His varied performances established Malden, former Times film critic
Charles Champlin once wrote, "as an Everyman, but one whose range moved
easily up and down the levels of society and the IQ scale, from heroes to
heavies and ordinary, decent guys just trying to get along."

Malden was a longtime holdout to television until he agreed to play Lt.
Mike Stone on the ABC police drama "The Streets of San Francisco," with
Michael Douglas. The series, which ran from 1972 to 1977, earned Malden
four consecutive Emmy nominations as lead actor in a drama series.

When he finally won his sole Emmy, it was for outstanding supporting actor
in a limited series or special, as a man who begins to suspect that his
daughter was murdered by her husband in the fact-based 1984 miniseries
"Fatal Vision."

Malden also starred in "Skag," a short-lived 1980 NBC dramatic series in
which he played a Serbian family man and union foreman at a Pittsburgh
steel mill.

But for all his movie and television roles, it was primarily the series of
American Express traveler's-check commercials Malden made between 1973 and
1994 that gave him his greatest public recognition. (Even Johnny Carson,
complete with fake proboscis, dark suit and short-brimmed fedora, spoofed
Malden's sober-faced commercials on "The Tonight Show.")

"After 50 years of doing all those other things in the business, wherever
I go, the one thing people will say to me is, 'Don't leave home without
it,' " Malden said in 1989. "What am I going to say? It's kind of
frustrating in a way, but at the same time, American Express has been very
good to me, and it's given me independence. I don't have to jump at
anything and everything that comes my way."

He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912, the son of an
immigrant mother from the nation that later became Czechoslovakia and a
Serbian father, who delivered milk for 38 years.

Malden spoke little English until after his family moved from their
Serbian enclave in Chicago to the steel-mill community of Gary, Ind., when
he was 5.

Malden's father was a theater lover who staged Serbian plays in the church
and in Serbian patriotic organizations in Gary. As a teenager, Malden
played heavies -- usually Turks, complete with a big, black mustache -- in
his father's productions.

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A brief video on the career of Karl Malden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qwGPvKid_c

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown