Karl Malden : a serious actor

Assessing the career of a performer, especially one as lengthy and complicated as Karl Malden's, is not an easy matter. Malden, who died in Los Angeles July 1, first made his name in the New York theater as part of a generally left-wing group of writers, directors and performers and later enjoyed a long career in Hollywood extending from the postwar years to the early 1970s. He most famously worked with Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), with Brando again as a fellow actor and director in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), and with Burt Lancaster and John Frankenheimer in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).

In addition to Kazan, Brando and Frankenheimer, Malden was directed in significant roles at various points in his career by Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Otto Preminger, King Vidor, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Mulligan, Mervyn LeRoy, John Ford, Norman Jewison, Richard Quine, Ken Russell and Franklin J. Schaffner—a list that includes some of the most interesting directors of the postwar period. He supported and often combated some of the leading male performers of his time: Brando, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, Burt Lancaster, Terence Stamp. He also performed with or against, often unhappily, some remarkable female performers, including Vivien Leigh, Jennifer Jones, Carroll Baker, Katy Jurado, Rosalind Russell, Ann-Margret ...

Always active and energetic, Malden found a new life in the 1970s in 120 episodes of the television series "The Streets of San Francisco," co-starring Michael Douglas, and functioned as a pitchman for American Express for 21 years.

An actor is at the mercy of numerous factors, from the most private and specific to the most general: his or her physical features, the quality of writers and directors with whom he or she works, and, certainly last but not least, the overall artistic and social atmosphere prevailing.

Malden was a serious actor, who nearly always made a strong impression. And it would be condescending, and mistaken, to suggest that he was merely competent and intelligent. He brought an intensity and depth to his best roles. He had lived and he knew something about life.