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.
Before embarking on the acting career for which he is renowned, Arkin had teamed up with Bob Carey and Erik Darling to form The Tarriers, a folk-inspired outfit that had two hits in the mid-Fifties. Cindy, Oh Cindy (with Vince Martin) and The Banana Boat Song both reached the top 40 in the UK in 1956-57.
Speaking about the second single, later covered by Harry Belafonte, he recalled, “It was just going to be a job that I did on weekends to earn some pocket money and within a couple of months after joining the group we had a hit record that took us around the world for a couple of years.” And it was The Tarriers that gave Arkin his movie debut, performing with his band in Calypso Heat Wave (1957), a musical directed by Fred F Sears and starring Merry Anders and Johnny Desmond.
Arkin as Captain Yossarian in ‘Catch-22’— (Getty)
Despite wanting to be an actor since childhood, Arkin did not get his stage breakthrough until 1960, when he joined Second City, the improvisational comedy group. Spotted during a performance in St Louis, he was asked by the co-founder, Paul Sills, to join the ensemble in Chicago. The musical From the Second City, for which he wrote sketches, in turn took him to Broadway for the first time and led to a starring role in the farce Enter Laughing (1963) which ran for more than 400 performances. A reviewer in the New York Times noted of that production “the major complaint ... is that it doesn’t provide enough rest periods between side-splitting laughs”.
His movie career launched with earnest in the comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), where he played a memorable and very funny Lieutenant Rozanov, and went on to be recognised in the Academy Awards with a nomination for Best Actor, as well as a Golden Globe.
‘Catch-22’ was a scathing satire on the madness of warfare— (FilmPublicityArchive/United Arch)
Arkin is perhaps best known for his starring role in Catch-22 (1970), the adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel of the same name, a scathing black comedy satire on war and warfare. Arkin’s character, Captain John Yossarian, seeks to avoid getting drafted but ends up flying a B-25 bomber during the Second World War.
His “Catch-22” situation is revealed in a sequence where the squadron physician explains to the by-now paranoid Yossarian the paradox by which “an airman would have to be crazy to fly more missions, and if he were crazy, he would be unfit to fly. Yet, if an airman were to refuse to fly more missions, this would indicate that he is sane, which would mean that he would be fit to fly the missions.” Arkin garnered a Golden Laurel nomination for his brilliant performance.
Greg Kinnear, left, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin hold their Screen Actors Guild Awards for their work in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ in 2007— (AP)
In Little Miss Sunshine (2006), the comedy road movie directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, he took on the role of a grumpy, foul-mouthed grandfather with a penchant for drugs, to hilarious effect. A well-deserved Oscar and Bafta, for best supporting actor, soon followed.
Arkin was equally at home behind the camera as a director, on films including Little Murders (1971), Fire Sale (1977), Samuel Beckett Is Coming Soon (1993) and People Soup (1969), which received an Oscar nomination for best live action short.
The title of his autobiography, An Improvised Life: A Memoir (2011), makes a nod to the era of his first experiences of improv, in early Sixties Chicago. Arkin’s writing reflects especially on the power of performance as a means of engendering emotional reality. His last two roles were in Spenser Confidential (Netflix, 2020) and The Smack, which is due to be released posthumously.
Arkin’s friend and colleague, Michael Douglas, paid tribute, saying: “Today we lost a wonderful actor whose intelligence, sense of comedy and consummate professionalism over the past 70 years has left an indelible mark on our industry. My experiences of working with Alan were some of my most memorable.”
Arkin was married three times. He had two sons with Jeremy Yaffe and one son with Barbara Dana. He was latterly married to Suzanne Newlander, a psychotherapist, with whom he lived in San Marcos, California.
Alan Arkin, actor and director, born 26 March 1934, died 29 June 2023
