I was writing about Eli Wallach just the other day. I’m co-authoring a coffee table book about America in the 20th century (more on that in a future post), and was working on the Marilyn Monroe entry. It’s not easy to encapsulate someone’s entire life and career in 500 words.
So when looking to briefly explain that Monroe was a talented actor despite being typecast as the ditzy blonde, I mentioned her performance in the Arthur Miller penned movie The Misfits, in which she co-starred with Clark Gable and Eli Wallach.
The implication is clear. If you could hold your own alongside Eli Wallach, you could really act.
The Misfits was actually the final film in the careers of Monroe and Gable, both of whom died shortly afterwards. But for Wallach, it was just one more role during a six decades-plus career in film, TV, and stage.
The son of Polish Jewish immigrants who owned a Brooklyn candy store, Eli Wallach was born in 1915 and raised in a predominantly Italian neighborhood. During the Great Depression, he attended the University of Texas(!), then returned to New York and earned a Master’s in education with an eye on becoming a teacher. But he also studied acting on the side and fell in love with it.
After serving in World War II and rising to the rank of captain in the Medical Corps, Wallach made his Broadway debut in 1945, and soon became a founding member of the famed Actors Studio, studying method acting with legendary instructor Lee Strasberg.
The stage was always Wallach’s first love, performing in dozens of plays on and off Broadway. And so he viewed his movie career as a means to an end: making enough money to raise his family while allowing himself to take on lesser paying stage roles.
“I go and get on a horse in Spain for 10 weeks, and I have enough cushion to come back and do a play,” he told The New York Times in 1973.
But of course it was Wallach’s many memorable film roles that cemented his place in popular culture, although it began dubiously.
In 1953, Wallach was the studio’s choice to play Angelo Maggio, the star-making role in From Here to Eternity. But at the last minute, he lost out to Frank Sinatra, who would win an Oscar and use it to transition from fading teeny bopper heart-throb to adult entertainer.
Remember the horse head scene in The Godfather? That’s a fictionalized rendition of Sinatra using his mob pull to get the part. While Sinatra did in fact have some Mafia connections, they probably played no role in his landing the the lead in From Here to Eternity. At least Wallach didn’t think so, always refuting the rumor.
Denied the star turn, Wallach went on to establish himself as one of the very best character actors of the 20th century with countless roles on screen and television.
After a memorable spot as a bandit in 1960’s The Magnificent Seven, Wallach made a lasting impression upon audiences around the world with his role in Sergio Leone’s seminal spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The 1966 film is often credited with reviving Clint Eastwood’s career, but it was Wallach as The Ugly and Lee Van Cleef as The Bad who made the movie simply riveting. Wallach dominated his scenes.
“Hey, Blondie.”
That’s all you have to say to conjure the image of Wallach as Tuco, the desperately charismatic two-faced schemer.
Eli Wallach also had a tangential connection to us academics. Most everyone in the Liberal Arts is familiar with the groundbreaking work of his niece, scholar Joan Wallach Scott. She, as much as anyone, is responsible for the founding of Gender Studies. That is, understanding how gender can be a social construct, and not just a facet of biology.
You know. Why blue is for boys and pink is for girls. Ain’t got nothing to do with biology.
Further down Eli Wallach’s famous family tree is Joan Wallach Scott’s son: A.O. Scott, the outstanding film critic for The Times.
It’s all too much to keep track of, but perhaps that’s a fitting representation of Wallach’s sprawling career, with hundreds of roles in several media from 1945-2010.
Though mostly remembered for one part in particular, Eli Wallach was an inextricable piece of American film, stage, and television for 65 years.