LOS ANGELES -- Martin Landau, the chameleon-like actor who gained fame as the crafty master of disguise in the 1960s TV show Mission: Impossible, then capped a long and versatile career with an Oscar for his poignant portrayal of aging horror movie star Bela Lugosi in 1994's Ed Wood, has died. He was 89.
Landau died Saturday of unexpected complications during a short stay at UCLA Medical Center, his publicist Dick Guttman said.
Landau's seven-decade career featured verdant artistic peaks -- including his work for directors Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Tim Burton -- and long stretches of arid desert.
The New Yorker once described him as "a survivor of B-movie hell," noting his long mid-career run of disaster films, blaxploitation movies and fright flicks.
"None of them were porno," the actor once quipped, "though some were worse."
Mission: Impossible, which also starred Landau's wife, Barbara Bain, became an immediate hit upon its debut in 1966. It remained on the air until 1973, but Landau and Bain left at the end of the show's third season amid a financial dispute with the producers. They starred in the British-made sci-fi series Space: 1999 from 1975 to 1977.
Landau might have been a superstar but for a role he didn't play -- the starship Enterprise's pointy-eared science officer, Mr. Spock. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had offered him the role of the half-Vulcan, half-human who attempts to rid his life of all emotion. Landau turned it down.
"A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomized," he said in 2001. Instead, he chose Mission: Impossible, and Leonard Nimoy went on to everlasting fame as Spock.
Ironically, Nimoy replaced Landau on Mission: Impossible.
After a brief but impressive Broadway career, Landau made his film debut in the late 1950s, playing a soldier in Pork Chop Hill.
Hitchcock, an early admirer, cast him in his most memorable early role, as espionage ringleader James Mason's closeted gay minion Leonard in 1959's North by Northwest. The film starred Cary Grant as a New York adman accidentally ensnared in an international spy ring.
Landau had proposed making Leonard covertly gay and worked with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to craft a line about his "woman's intuition" -- to be delivered before the character demonstrates how Mason's girlfriend, played by Eva Marie Saint, has betrayed them.
"It was quite a big risk in cinema at the time," Landau told the London Daily Telegraph in 2012. "My logic was simply that he wanted to get rid of Eva Marie Saint with such a vengeance, so it made sense for him to be in love with his boss, Vandamm. ... Every one of my friends thought I was crazy, but Hitchcock liked it."
After Mission: Impossible, however, he enjoyed far less success, finding he had been typecast as Rollin Hand, the top-secret mission team's disguise wizard. His film career languished for more than a decade, reaching its nadir with his appearance in the 1981 TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island.
He began to find redemption with a sympathetic role in Tucker: The Man and his Dream, the 1988 film by Coppola that garnered Landau his first Oscar nomination.
He was nominated again the next year for his turn as the adulterous husband in Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors.
His third nomination was for Ed Wood, Burton's affectionate tribute to a man widely viewed as the worst Hollywood filmmaker of all time.
"There was a 10-year period when everything I did was bad. I'd like to go back and turn all those films into guitar picks," Landau said after accepting his Oscar.
In Ed Wood, he portrayed Lugosi during his final years, when the Hungarian-born actor who had become famous as Count Dracula was ill, addicted to drugs and forced to make films with Ed Wood just to pay his bills. A gifted mimic trained in method acting, Landau had thoroughly researched the role.
"I watched about 35 Lugosi movies, including ones that were worse than anything Ed Wood ever made," he recalled in 2001. "Despite the trash, he had a certain dignity about him, whatever the role."
Although well-reviewed, Ed Wood was not a commercial success, and Landau never fully capitalized on his renewed celebrity. He appeared in an uneven parade of films and TV shows, including the limp comedy B.A.P.S in 1997 as a rich sugar daddy to Halle Berry and Natalie Desselle, and Burton's animated Frankenweenie, in 2012, as the voice of young Victor Frankenstein's science teachers.
"If I was an opera singer or a ballet dancer, I probably wouldn't be able to do that any longer, but being an actor playing old guys is kind of a gift," Landau told the Star, a South African publication. "Half of the people I came up with are gone, and the other half don't remember what they had for breakfast, so I'm very lucky."
Landau was born in Brooklyn on June 20, 1928. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, was a skilled machinist.
The younger Landau joined the New York Daily News as a cartoonist and, after five years, he turned down a promotion for fear that he would remain at the paper forever. Seeing bad actors had convinced him that he could do it better.
He had dabbled in acting before switching careers at age 22, making his stage debut in 1951 at a Maine summer theater in Detective Story and off-Broadway in First Love.
In 1955, he was among hundreds who applied to study at the prestigious Actors Studio and one of only two selected. The other was Steve McQueen.
On Broadway, Landau won praise for his work in Middle of the Night, which starred Edward G. Robinson. He toured with the play until it reached Los Angeles, where he began his film career.
Landau and Bain had two daughters, Susan and Juliet. They divorced in 1993.
Information for this article was contributed by Bob Thomas of The Associated Press and by Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post.
A Section on 07/17/2017