Alan Arkin, who has died aged 89, was an Oscar-winning actor and director who starred in dozens of popular films and television programmes in a career spanning seven decades. He moved seamlessly from comedy to drama in works that ranged from cult classics, such as Catch-22, to the quirky box office hit Little Miss Sunshine.
Alan Wolf Arkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934 to Beatrice Arkin, a teacher, and David I Arkin, a teacher and painter. In 1945, his father relocated the family to Los Angeles, where the young Arkin took drama lessons. “Every film I saw, every play, every piece of music fed an unquenchable need to turn myself into something other than what I was," he later said of his childhood.
