Alan Arkin, who has died aged 89, was a star at the beginning of his career and a beloved character actor until the end. Though best known for comedies, most notably Catch-22 (1970) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006), lightness was not necessarily his forte; even at his funniest, he exuded gravitas. “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 the Second City, which he co-wrote.
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.”
Photograph: Warner Bros/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
Arkin had already directed several shorts when he embarked on his full-length directing debut, an adaptation of Jules Feiffer’s blackly comic play Little Murders (1971), set in a fractured and hostile New York City. The film’s critical reputation has grown steadily along with that of Arkin’s follow-up, Fire Sale (1977). Both pictures exhibit an acidic, rueful comic tone consistent with the mood of 1970s independent cinema.
In the same decade, Arkin played a long-distance truck driver in Deadhead Miles (1972), scripted by Terrence Malick; unsure how to market this eccentric road movie, Paramount shelved it, though it has surfaced occasionally on television. He teamed up with James Caan in the action comedy Freebie and the Bean (1974), with Peter Falk in The In-Laws (1979) and with Jeff Bridges in the 1930s-set Hearts of the West (1975). In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1977), he played Sigmund Freud, who welcomes Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) as a patient. He was a washed-up superhero in the Australian musical comedy The Return of Captain Invincible (1983) and a concentration camp prisoner in Escape from Sobibor (1987).
During the 1990s, Arkin’s movie career began its second flourishing. He specialised in sympathetic father figures in Coupe de Ville and Edward Scissorhands (both 1990) and Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), and played a desperate salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), the film of David Mamet’s play. He was also memorable as an assassin’s psychiatrist in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). An acclaimed performance as a troubled insurance manager in Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001) attracted further awards.
The independent smash Little Miss Sunshine exploited Arkin’s contradictory qualities of coarseness and warmth. After that, most of his films felt minor: in 2008 he delivered another beneficent father routine in Sunshine Cleaning and a helping of spy antics in Get Smart, and was a twinkly editor in the family hit Marley & Me. More challenging was Rebecca Miller’s drama The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), in which Arkin played a man married to a woman 30 years his junior. His fond portrayal of a grizzled movie producer in Argo (2012), Ben Affleck’s thriller set during the Iran hostage crisis, was hugely admired and was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar.
He starred with Al Pacino and Christopher Walken as ageing crooks reuniting for one last job in Stand Up Guys (2012), and with Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman as retirees who plot to rob a bank after losing their pensions in Going in Style (2017). He was also in Tim Burton’s live-action remake of Dumbo (2019) and played a Hollywood agent in the Netflix series The Kominsky Method (2019) with Michael Douglas.
In 2020, he published Out of My Mind, which detailed his 20-year friendship with his spiritual mentor John Battista, though Battista’s full name is not mentioned in the book, nor his fall from grace (Battista was charged with the sexual abuse of several women and one girl) and suicide. The scandal caused a kind of paralysis in Arkin for six months, he told the Guardian in 2020. “But I doggedly went on and I’m glad that I did.”
He is survived by his third wife, Suzanne Newlander, whom he married in 1996, two sons, Adam and Matthew, from his first marriage, and a son, Anthony, from his second marriage.
• Alan Wolf Arkin, actor and director, born 26 March 1934; died 29 June 2023
• This article was amended on 3 July 2023. Alan Arkin joined the Compass Players in Chicago, rather than St Louis, as an earlier version stated.
