2023-06-30 16:53:03
Deceased today at 89 yearsAmerican actor Alan Arkin He was almost always an excellent secondary or one of those interpreters who greased the dissonant pieces in more choral films. Film prestige in the form of awards came a little late, in 2007, with the Oscar for best supporting actor for independent comedy ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, in which he played the out-of-control grandfather of the dysfunctional family who travels by van to the city where a children’s beauty pageant is being held. By then he had already been acting in the cinema for four decades since he debuted in a very different comedy, ‘The Russians are coming! What are the Russians coming? with Carl Reiner and Eve Marie Saint. In the theater she had managed to establish herself long before, because in 1963 she won the Tony award for her role in ‘Enter laughing‘, the work of the same Reiner with whom three years later he would form a couple on the big screen in the face of the Russian ‘threat’.
his face apparently not very expressive, between grumpy and ironic, sometimes in features similar to those of a Walter Matthau, allowed him to attack wayward, acid, caustic characters, almost always secretly funny, more inclined to comedy than drama, although he combined both registers well. Perhaps his best period was from the late 1960s to the middle of the following decade, when he took on his most remembered characters in ‘Alone in the dark’ –where he played one of the criminals who threaten a blind woman incarnated by Audrey Hepburn at home–, ‘The King of Danger’ -replaced Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau-, the devastating ‘Trap 22’, ‘An odd couple of cops’ –one of the first ‘buddy movies’, hand in hand with James Caan– and ‘Elemental, Dr. Freud’in which he gave life to Sigmund Freud facing Sherlock Holmes.
If the ’80s were low-key, the ’90s started much better with small roles in ‘Edward Scissorhands’, ‘Rocketeer’, ‘Havana’ or one of those choral stories in which Arkin shone with his own light, ‘Glengarry Glen Ross: Success at any cost’, about a group of real estate agents described by David Mamet. In recent years he showed off his skills in the shadow of the stars in ‘Gattaca’, ‘Superagent 86 the movie’, ‘Argo’ and the version of ‘Dumbo’ directed by Tim Burton.
Of Jewish and Ukrainian descent, Arkin directed several shorts, television episodes, and the feature film ‘Little murders’ (1971), a crime comedy starring an actor with similar characteristics to his, Elliot Gould, and Donald Sutherland. These two had triumphed a couple of years earlier with ‘MASH’, the medical comedy set in the Korean War in which Arkin would have been ideal, given his poignant record, for any other character.
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