Movie
Actor Alan Arkin is dead
US actor Alan Arkin has died. photo
© Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Wire/dpa
After four decades in Hollywood, Alan Arkin finally won the coveted trophy for “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2007. The actor has died at the age of 89.
After a long career spanning over 50 films and three Oscar nominations, Arkin had all but given up hope of gold. A bizarre role as a sex- and drug-obsessed grandfather, who rolls in the trunk of the US highway after his death, brought the character actor the well-deserved Oscar triumph at the end. Arkin won the 2007 Best Supporting Actor trophy for his acclaimed road movie Little Miss Sunshine, about a family gone haywire.
He was promptly nominated for an Oscar for his first film role, Norman Jewison’s 1966 satire The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming. A year later, as a psychopathic killer, he bullied a blind woman, played by Audrey Hepburn, in the thriller Wait Until Dark.
After school he wanted to be a musician
His second Oscar nomination came in 1969 for portraying a deaf man in the drama The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, based on the novel by Carson McCullers. After the Oscar for “Little Miss Sunshine”, the veteran star was nominated again in 2013 for a supporting role in the political thriller “Argo”. Arkin, born in New York in 1934, actually wanted to be a musician after school and also celebrated his first successes, turned but then turned to acting and landed roles in theaters and films. He also worked as a director and children’s book author.
Among Arkin’s memorable roles is his appearance as a bomber pilot in the war farce Catch-22 (1970), directed by Mike Nichols. In the 1990s he attracted attention with supporting roles in “Glengarry Glen Ross”, “Jacob the Liar” and “Gattaca”. He stood in front of the camera until old age. With Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman he shot the crime comedy “Abgang mit Stil” in 2017, a year later the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method” with Michael Douglas. In 2019, at the age of 85, he received a star plaque on Hollywood’s “Walk of Fame”.