Alan Arkin’s private life was about as far from Tinseltown superficiality as a Hollywood superstar could get. The Oscar-winning star of Little Miss Sunshine and Catch-22, who has died at the age of 89, cultivated his own organic vegetables in his Santa Fe garden, pored over Eastern philosophy, went for long walks, baked bread and meditated for more than two hours a day.
Although they watched movies and old Seinfeld shows on DVD, he and his wife Suzanne avoided popular culture. “We haven’t watched TV in 12 years,” Arkin admitted in 2020. And that included Netflix’s The Kominsky Method, which would mark Arkin’s final significant acting role. For three seasons, he portrayed Norman Newlander, the agent to actor Sandy Kominsky (played by Michael Douglas). The show ended in 2020 but, when speaking to The Independent in 2020, Arkin’s publicity manager confirmed that the actor had no plans for retirement, after a career in which he’d made 80 movies and starred in dozens of television shows and plays. Arkin did, however, once tell his friend Andrea Donsky that “the less work I get, the better my health. The stress in the market place is enormous and my system has a fast reaction. I can’t deal with stress anymore.”
