Jack Palance; LA Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
November 11, 2006 Saturday
HEADLINE: Obituaries;
Jack Palance, 87; gravelly voiced actor won Oscar as crusty
trail boss in `City Slickers'
BYLINE: Myrna Oliver, Special to The Times
Jack Palance, the leather-faced, gravelly voiced actor who
earned Academy Award nominations for "Sudden Fear" and
"Shane," and who finally captured the Oscar almost 40 years
later as the crusty trail boss in the 1991 comedy western
"City Slickers," has died. He was 87.
Palance, who had been in failing health with a number of
maladies, died Friday of natural causes at the Montecito
home of his daughter Holly, family members said.
He was one of the best-loved bad guys in motion picture and
television history -- the murderous husband in "Sudden Fear"
(1952), the creepy gunslinger in "Shane" (1953) and the
cantankerous cattle driver Curly in "City Slickers" -- and
kept acting well into his 80s.
"When it comes to playing hard-bitten cowboys, there could
never be anyone better than Jack," "City Slickers" director
Ron Underwood told The Times on Friday. "He was a scary,
intimidating guy with a very warm and giving heart."
Palance's performance accepting the Oscar may have been more
memorable than the gnarly star turn that earned it.
Upon winning, he dropped to the stage floor of the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion and delighted the audience with vigorous
one-armed push-ups. Septuagenarian actors, he said, must
continually prove their virility to keep working in
youth-oriented Hollywood.
The surprise stunt provided fodder for a series of ad-libbed
jokes throughout the evening by Billy Crystal, his "City
Slickers" co-star and the show's host. The next year's
ceremony, in 1993, opened with Palance -- then 74 -- using
his teeth to tow across the stage a 20-foot-tall Oscar
statuette ridden by Crystal.
"I am deeply shocked and saddened by the loss of my dear
friend Jack Palance, a true movie icon," Crystal said in a
statement Friday. "Winning the Oscar for that movie and the
one-armed push-ups he did on the show will link us together
forever, and for that I am grateful."
The two men worked together again in the 1994 sequel "City
Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold." Since Palance's
Curly had died in the first film, he portrayed Curly's
equally curmudgeonly identical twin. "Only Palance returns
with a flourish," the Times review said. "He's as gnarled
and critter-like as ever."
He had shown a flair for funny in the comic fable "Bagdad
Cafe" (1988), in which he played a retired Hollywood set
painter turned primitive artist. Palance was "a constant
revelation and delight," the Times review said, and emerged
"as a terrific comedian."
Equally at home on television, Palance earned an Emmy for
his role as a has-been boxer in "Requiem for a Heavyweight"
in 1956. And he was still doing quality work on television
in the 1990s -- notably in the third installment of the
Glenn Close-Christopher Walken vehicle "Sarah Plain and
Tall," in which he portrayed Walken's long-lost and resented
father.
In the Wild West retelling of "A Christmas Carol," Palance
starred as the title character in the movie "Ebenezer, "
which premiered on cable in 1998. The classic Charles
Dickens story was updated with a protagonist who runs a
saloon in the 1870s and snarls, "Christmas, hogwash."
"This Ebenezer Scrooge is no harmless old crank; he's a gun
ready to go off -- and that makes his redemption all the
more cathartic," a Times reviewer wrote.
Given his customary vile appearance in the black garb of
various bad guys in the Old West, there was little wonder
that Palance and his pictures easily made 1997's "The Manly
Movie Guide" by David Everitt and Harold Schechter. His name
is listed with such classic western toughs as John Wayne and
Clint Eastwood.
In reality, the man born Feb. 18, 1919, and named Volodymir
Ivanovich Palahniuk hailed not from the West but from the
coal country around Lattimer Mines, Pa., and was a fairly
sensitive fellow.
Although he enjoyed raising cattle, he was a vegetarian who
had painted abstract landscapes since the 1950s, loved trees
and wrote poetry. He wrote and illustrated a book with the
non-villainous title of "The Forest of Love: A Love Story in
Blank Verse," which was published in 1996.
Surrounded by art in Rome, where he lived for a number of
years making spaghetti westerns, Palance was inspired to
take up painting. His artwork, which bore the stamp of
Impressionism, had been exhibited about a dozen times, he
told the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call in 1999.
Palance maintained a 1,000-acre cattle ranch in California's
Tehachapi Mountains and a 500-acre farm near his roots in
heavily forested Luzerne County, Pa. His ranch brand was an
"H" with a "B" and a "C" woven around it, the initials of
the first names of his children, Holly, Brooke and Cody.
It was the farm, he said, that inspired his book about a
man's love for a woman and nature.
"Everything I talk about is about Pennsylvania," he said of
the prose poem that was published among his paintings and
line drawings of trees. "I'm not inspired as much by
California."
As for his refusal to eat red meat, Palance told the Morning
Call: "I've got so many cattle that I didn't want to feel
like I was eating them.... Because if you walk amongst the
cattle, occasionally you'll find that you have a friend....
These little ones -- they'll run after you like a dog.... "
The celluloid tough guy, at 6 feet 3 and 200 pounds, grew up
in coal-mining country but had no intention of becoming a
miner. He attended the University of North Carolina on a
football scholarship and dropped out to try boxing.
He had a 12-2 record as a professional boxer, and by the
1940s he was making $200 a fight, The Times reported in
1995.
"Then I thought, 'You must be nuts to get your head beat in
for $200.' The theater seemed a lot more appealing," Palance
told The Times.
When World War II came, he served in the Army Air Forces. A
bomber pilot who had seen little action, he was at the
controls when his plane lost an engine and slammed
nose-first into the ground. He suffered severe head injuries
and required extensive facial reconstruction.
"There are some moments you never get over," Palance said in
1995. "That was one of them."
After his discharge, he changed his last name to Palance and
resumed his education at Stanford University, studying
journalism. He became a sportswriter for the San Francisco
Chronicle and worked for a radio station.
Unhappy with the $35-a-week journalist's pay, he took the
advice of an actress friend and headed for Broadway. Within
two weeks, Palance was in a play.
After appearing in such fare as "Temporary Island" and "The
Vigil" and a stint as Marlon Brando's understudy in "A
Streetcar Named Desire," he won a "most promising
personality" award for his 1950 appearance in "Darkness at
Noon."
His theatrical success helped him in Hollywood, where
Palance made his film debut in director Elia Kazan's "Panic
in the Streets" in 1950. Billed as Walter Palance, he
portrayed a fugitive carrying the bubonic plague.
The role earned him a back-handed accolade from columnist
Hedda Hopper, who described him as "a man who could play
Frankenstein without makeup."
Within two years, he had earned his first Academy Award
nomination, as the menacing actor husband of Joan Crawford's
playwright in "Sudden Fear."
A year later, he was nominated again for being, in the words
of film historian Leonard Maltin, "unforgettable in [the]
role of the creepy hired gunslinger" Jack Wilson in "Shane."
In 1956, Palance put his real-life training as a boxer to
work in "Requiem for a Heavyweight," which was written by
Rod Serling and aired on the dramatic anthology series
"Playhouse 90." The New York Times called the show "an
artistic triumph that featured a performance of
indescribable poignancy by Jack Palance."
Palance appeared in about 100 motion pictures, as well as
many specials and movies for television. He had lead roles
in such series as the "The Greatest Show on Earth" (ABC,
1963-64), in which he played hard-driving circus boss Johnny
Slate, and "Bronk" (CBS, 1975-76), as contemplative police
detective Lt. Alex Bronkov.
As the host of "Ripley's Believe It or Not" on ABC from 1982
to 1986, he "loved to skulk about the ruins and add a
sinister tone to his narration of the stories," according to
"The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV
Shows". His actress daughter Holly joined him as co-host for
part of that time.
"He's an original in the category of old-timers who don't
care what people think," Holly Palance told The Times in
1995. "You have to remember that he clawed his way out of
the mines.... A lot of what he calls manhood is the simple
love of privacy."
He didn't talk, she said, unless he had something important
to say.
Palance was married to actress Virginia Baker for 18 years,
and they had three children. The marriage ended in divorce.
In addition to his daughters, Holly Palance and Brooke
Palance Wilding, he is survived by his wife, Elaine Rogers
Palance; a brother, John Palance; a sister, Anne Despiva;
and three grandchildren. His son, Cody, who appeared with
his father in the 1988 film "Young Guns," died of cancer in
1998.
Services are pending. Instead of flowers, the family
requests that donations be made to the Pennsylvania State
University Hazleton campus, www.hn.psu.edu.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Palance hailed not from the West but from
the coal country of Pennsylvania. He maintained a 1,000-acre
cattle ranch in California's Tehachapi Mountains, above, and
a 500-acre farm in Pennsylvania. PHOTOGRAPHER: Bob Carey Los
Angeles Times PHOTO: In 1992, after accepting the best
supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of Curly in "City
Slickers," Palance did one-armed push-ups on the stage floor
of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. PHOTO: JACK PALANCE: The
veteran actor, right, starred with Billy Crystal in the 1991
comedy western "City Slickers." PHOTOGRAPHER: Bruce McBroom
PHOTO: (A1) PHOTOGRAPHER: Paramount Pictures/AMPAS