Obituaries Detail

“I’ve studied acting seriously,” he said in 1982. “I’m not the clown who wants to be Hamlet or anything like that. I just think that regarding oneself as comic means that one’s primary obligation is to get laughs.” He could be a prickly figure. “Alan does not meet you halfway as an actor,” said the writer-director Marshall Brickman, who cast him as a brainwashed scientist in the science-fiction comedy Simon (1980). “He’s a very serious actor. I think he’s brilliant. But he’s not interested in winning you over via personality. The way he photographs has a kind of austerity that’s a little hard for an audience to take. You either like Alan or you don’t.” The Oscar Arkin won for playing a heroin-snorting grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine ratified his status as a US national treasure. Arkin was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Beatrice (nee Wortis) and David Arkin, both schoolteachers. As a child, he attended acting classes. The family moved to Los Angeles when Alan was 11, but trouble befell the family when David was accused of communist affiliations (disproved posthumously) during the McCarthy era. Alan studied acting at Los Angeles State College of Applied Arts and Sciences (now California State University, Los Angeles) before transferring to Bennington College, Vermont. In 1955, he married Jeremy Yaffe, and became active in the folk music scene. Along with fellow members of his group, the Tarriers, he was credited as co-writer of The Banana Boat Song (Day-O), an adaptation of a Jamaican folk standard. (A different version was a hit for Harry Belafonte.) After an inauspicious film debut with the Tarriers in Calypso Heat Wave (1957), he threw in his lot with acting. He made his off-Broadway debut in the late 1950s and joined the Chicago improvisational group the Compass Players in 1959. This led to a stint with the Chicago improv troupe Second City and his Broadway debut, in 1961, in the company’s show From t

Arkin did not forgo folk music entirely: he formed the children’s group the Babysitters, which also featured Yaffe until their divorce. The band was later joined by his second wife, the actor and writer Barbara Dana, whom he married in 1964. He left Second City after landing the lead on Broadway in a 1963 production, Enter Laughing, for which he won a Tony award. In the same year, he wrote, scored and starred in the Oscar-nominated short film That’s Me. Norman Jewison gave him his first major film role in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), a comic take on cold war paranoia. Arkin received an Oscar nomination for his performance as a lieutenant on a Soviet submarine that runs aground in New England. His range was indisputable. Comparisons to Peter Sellers abounded even before Arkin took the title role in the misguided, off-piste comedy Inspector Clouseau (1968). He accepted a rare villainous part in Wait Until Dark (1967), terrorising a blind Audrey Hepburn. In the same year, he played one of Shirley MacLaine’s lovers in Vittorio de Sica’s portmanteau film Woman Times Seven. He won a second Oscar nomination for playing a deaf man in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), adapted from the novel by Carson McCullers, and starred as a Puerto Rican widower raising his children in Popi (1969). His landmark role came when he was cast as the anxious bombardier Yossarian in Mike Nichols’s film of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby summed up Arkin’s appeal: “[He] is not a comedian; he is a deadly serious actor, but because he projects intelligence with such monomaniacal intensity, he is both funny and heroic at the same time.” The eight-month shoot was an arduous experience for the actor. “If they had shot footage of the making of the film,” he said, “it would’ve been a hell of a lot closer to the book than the movie was.”