1/2/2024 0 Comments Jack palance![]() In 1952, just two years into Palance’s film career, Los Angeles Times writer John L. His expression could immediately project menace, but also something softer. The rugged cheekbones, the deep-set eyes and the sneering mouth-not to mention a 6-foot-4, 230-pound body-seemed ready-made to play silver screen bad guys. In 1987 he married Elaine Rogers, but that marriage also ended in divorce.From the get-go, people focused on Jack Palance’s face. They had three children, Brooke, Holly, and Cody, who predeceased him. His marriage to Virginia Baker in 1949 ended in divorce in 1966. The last was on TV, in Back When We Were Grownups (2004).įrom the late 1950s Palance had been an amateur artist and in 1996 he wrote and illustrated the prose poem Forest of Love: A Love Story in Blank Verse. He made four screen appearances in the 21st century - and his sixth decade in the movies. He took on a series of classic parts - Scrooge in Ebenezer (1997) and Long John Silver in yet another version of Treasure Island (1999). Then came the plum part in City Slickers.įor the rest of the decade he remained busy in television movies. After that he worked with Andrei Konchalovsky as a gun-runner in the action movie Tango and Cash and had a couple of outings in sword-and-sorcery movies. In 1989 he returned triumphantly to the big time as Carl Grissom in Batman, the first and best of the revived series. In the latter he played an oddball painter dressed in snakeskin boots. By the beginning of the 1980s he was moving into an extended break to concentrate on his Californian cattle ranch.īut then, in 1988 he made a spectacular return in the lively western Young Guns and the German director Percy Adlon's cult comedy Bagdad Cafe. A decent western, Monte Walsh, followed in 1970.Ī stream of European films in the 1970s was interrupted by Palance's moving portrayal of the Count in a television version of Dracula and the prestigious, if dull, Oklahoma Crude (both 1973). There was also Torture Garden (1967), a British horror flick. But among other material in that decade was Le Mépris (Contempt 1963) Jean Luc Godard's swipe at movie moguls which starred Brigitte Bardot and Palance, and also featured Fritz Lang - as himself. The latter included Richard Fleischer's Barabbas (1962) and the superior suspense western, The Professionals (1966), with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. It ushered in two decades where, despite working prolifically in American television and films, Palance found most of his employment abroad - mainly in Italy, often working in sword-and-sandal epics and westerns, or occasionally for American directors shooting abroad. Palance brought force and integrity to the role. Aldrich then cast him in Attack! (1956) as a dedicated soldier, who realises that his cowardly commanding officer (Eddie Albert), is endangering his men. Palance and Rod Steiger battled it out at full volume. In Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife (1955), the sometime leftist writer Clifford Odets's attack on Hollywood, Palance starred as Charles Castle, a famous actor blackmailed by a vicious studio boss into signing a new contract. Palance enjoyed greater success in the Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), winning an Emmy in the television version of Rod Serling's boxing drama. In 1955 he starred in I Died a Thousand Times - a remake of High Sierra, which had starred Humphrey Bogart. There was plenty of TV work and in 1954 he played Attila the Hun in Sign of the Pagan (1954), one of Douglas Sirk's lesser films. Then came came Sudden Fear, Shane, the Oscar nominations and a part in Arrowhead (1953) as an Apache. Kazan's Panic in the Streets, in which Palance played Blackie, a bubonic plague carrier who is being pursued across New Orleans by the police, was followed by the war movie Halls of Montezuma. ![]() He made his television debut in 1950 and his first films - as Walter Jack Palance. In 1948 he began understudying for Anthony Quinn's Stanley Kowalski in the touring production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and he then replaced Marlon Brando in the Broadway production of Streetcar, which brought him to the attention of director Elia Kazan. Postwar, via the GI bill, Palance graduated in 1947 in drama from Stanford University, California, and almost immediately got parts on Broadway. In 1942, he enrolled in the US army air corps, but a year later while training in Arizona his B24 Liberator bomber crashed and he suffered severe burns, which needed extensive plastic surgery. Other jobs included modelling, waiting, and working as a lifeguard. Like his father, he was a miner, but, by the end of the 1930s, Palance, tall and well-built was working as "Jack Brazzo", a professional boxer. Palance was born in Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, the third son of Ukrainian immigrants.
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