Tough, unsentimental, witty, gravel-voiced and bullet-headed, Alan Arkin was a wiry character actor and comic presence who had a colossal career on stage, TV and movies. He came from the era of male stars such as Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Ben Gazzara, Robert Duvall and Peter Falk – actors who projected a kind of take-it-or-leave-it pugnacity, integrity and strength. The always sympathetic and technically brilliant Arkin perhaps came into his own late in life, his face and shaven head morphing into a black-comic skull of derision and hilarity as the outrageous old guy who says what he wants because he’s decided he doesn’t care any more what people think … that’s if he ever did care.
In 2006, Arkin won the best supporting actor Academy Award for the part of Edwin Hoover, the chaotic old grandpa with the no-bullshit honesty in Little Miss Sunshine. Edwin is part of a bizarre dysfunctional extended family who hit the road in a VW van to get his little granddaughter Olive (played by Abigail Breslin) from New Mexico to California, where she will compete in a junior beauty pageant in questionable taste called “Little Miss Sunshine”. It is Arkin’s cheerfully unfiltered, unedited grandpa who has the most authentically sunny disposition and keeps saying tactless stuff, having been thrown out of his care home for taking heroin.
