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The Guardian (18/Oct/2012) - Martin Landau: From North by Northwest to Frankenweenie

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Martin Landau: From North by Northwest to Frankenweenie

He was friends with James Dean, dated Marilyn Monroe and made his movie debut with Hitchcock: Martin Landau, the voice of Mr Rzykruski in Frankenweenie, talks about his 60-year acting career

Midway through the interview, at the end of a monologue during which he has first marvelled at the way I can access the internet on my tape-machine (I can't) and then upset the coffee table by crossing his legs, Martin Landau checks and gives a rueful smile. "Anyway," he says. "You asked me a question a while ago. I'm sort of going on and on like a dial-tone here."

By this point it's clear that an audience with Landau will not run on conventional lines. Questions are not so much questions as prompts: an invitation for the actor to embark on another strolling pastoral through his 60-year career. He talks about the craft of acting, the actors he has known and the roles he has played. Along the way he speaks in different voices. One moment he's Burton, Gielgud, Olivier; the next he's a drunk remonstrating with the barman, or an Italian-American with a hair-trigger temper. Each impression is so eerily well-observed and so perfectly delivered that it's impossible not to laugh. If this was how a dial-tone sounded, you would never make the call.

"Whaddaya laughing about?" barks Landau, reluctant to relinquish his Mafia hoodlum. "Behave yourself. You got two good legs there, you wanna watch they don't get broke."

Once, by way of illustration, he affects the voice of Mr Rzykruski, the stentorian science teacher he plays in Tim Burton's animated Frankenweenie. Landau explains that the script stipulated only that Rzykruski was "European", which meant that he had to fill in the gaps. He decided that the character hailed from the land of "Slobovia", that he fled after insulting the prime minister and that he probably only lasts about two months in every school on account of being so blunt and impolitic. "Great teachers are the ones who inspire you," says Landau. "Now, I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman and those guys set a very high bar. You had to break your ass and be as good as you could be."

Landau turned 84 last birthday. His hair is white and his face is lined and he explains that he stiffens up if he sits in the same chair for too long. But back in the 1950s he was one of the fiery young Turks of American acting, a leading exponent of the method school that turned the system on its head. In the year he began his apprenticeship at the Actors Studio, only he and Steve McQueen were accepted from a list of 2000 applicants. He made his Broadway debut in 1957, then bagged a supporting role opposite James Mason and Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

I ask Landau whether he was forced to adapt his method training for life on a Hitchcock set and he insists that he didn't, because the discipline of theatre translates well to the discipline of film. "The average scene in a film, you have to shoot it 15, 20 times. That means you got to laugh or cry 15, 20 times. Now who tries to laugh? Only bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him. No one tries to cry in real life; they try not to. So it's all about filling a space and creating a character. That's why I'm interested. It's still an adventure."

In his youth, Landau was good friends with James Dean and briefly dated Marilyn Monroe. Was there a sense that the two were somehow ill-starred, pointed towards disaster, destined to die young?

"No, no, no," he says with uncharacteristic emphasis. "Jimmy never talked about dying; Jimmy talked about living. Jimmy's only concern was that he would become an old boy, like Mickey Rooney. When Kazan tested actors for East of Eden, Paul Newman and Jimmy auditioned on the same day. Paul looked like a man when he was 20, whereas Jimmy was still playing high-school kids at 23. So that bothered him a bit. But Jimmy did not want to die. And there's always a lot of conjecture about Marilyn's death. It's still a mystery; no one seems to know exactly what happened. Yes, there were ongoing issues with Marilyn, but they did not support the idea of suicide in any way, shape or form."

He mulls it over; returns to Dean. "A lot of people say Jimmy was hell-bent on killing himself. Not true. A lot of gay guys make him out to be gay. Not true. When Jimmy and I were together we'd talk about girls. Actors and girls. We were kids in our early 20s. That was what we aspired to."

Both were to take very different routes through the industry. Where Dean lit up like a roman candle, Landau sat on the shelf, gently maturing. The problem, maybe, was that he never quite fit the popular image of the anguished, sweaty method actor. Landau was too delicate, too cerebral, too spookily beautiful. Following his turn in North by Northwest, he cropped up, sixth-billed, in studio epics like Cleopatra and the Greatest Story Ever Told, while his greatest success came playing Rollin' Hand in the small-screen Mission: Impossible. He was reputedly Gene Roddenberry's first choice to play Mr Spock in Star Trek and took the lead role as a star-base commander in Space 1999. But by the late 1980s, Landau's career looked in all kinds of trouble. It took a supporting role as a soulful financier in Francis Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream to dredge him from the doldrums.

"Oh, Tucker resurrected me," he concedes. "Before that I did several films that should be turned into toothpicks. I was being offered, you know, professional bad guys in the evil business, total comic-strip stuff. When I got Tucker I thought, 'Thank God, a human being'." The film earned him an Oscar nomination and paved the way for what may be his greatest screen performance: playing dithering Judah Rosenthal, the good man gone bad in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours. In 1995 he finally secured the Academy Award for his turn as tragicomic Bela Lugosi in Burton's Ed Wood. His third act has been bolder, brighter and altogether more rewarding than the two that went before.

Landau points out that he still serves as artistic director at the west coast branch of the Actors Studio. It's not a school, he cautions me, but "an exclusive club for talented people", with an audition process that's as tough as it ever was. "Dustin Hoffman lies a little bit. He says he had to audition nine times before he got in, but it was only six. Gene Hackman – three or four times. But I find young people today are lazier, less driven." Once again, he gestures at my tape recorder. "I mean, this is an amazing thing. You can get a book on this thing."

You really can't, I tell him.

"When I wanted a book I had to walk a mile to the library! And then it was probably gone! 'Come back Thursday, it might have been returned.'" He shakes his head. "Today everything's at your fingertips."

Next up for Landau is a role as J Howard Marshall, the doddery billionaire husband of Anna Nicole Smith. "We know him as this old geezer who picked her up in a strip-club," he explains. "But he graduated from Yale as magna cum laude. He worked for Roosevelt before world war two. He was seen as the best lawyer in America. So there's a lot to work with, I should have some fun. I think it's the first time I've played older than I am."

Some years ago he was in Prague, playing Gepetto in a live-action version of Pinocchio when he wandered past a shop selling Hollywood memorabilia. The window was crammed with posters, T-shirts, and novelty mirrors frosted with the image of antique celebrities. Pride of place was given to a life-sized cardboard cut-out of James Dean, posing with his cigarette, resplendent in the red jacket he wore in Rebel Without a Cause. "And it stopped me," Landau says. "I looked at Jimmy, frozen in time, 24 when he died. And my reflection in the window was right over his face. My focus shifted and all of a sudden I'm looking at this old guy in the glass. White hair and wrinkles. It struck me oddly; it was really weird. That's the Jimmy I know," he says. "And look what happened to me."