Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008.

Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93....

As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film Kiss of Death, Mr Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death.

Updated through 3/30.

"The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen," the critic David ThomsonThe Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Aljean Harmetz, New York Times.

"That damned laugh of mine!" he told a reporter in 1961. "For two years after that picture, you couldn't get me to smile. I played the part the way I did because the script struck me as funny and the part I played made me laugh. The guy was such a ridiculous beast."

The AP.

See also: Classic Movies and Wikipedia.

Updates: "Not many stars today have the emotional equilibrium to keep their private lives private," writes Richard Corliss for Time, where you'll find clips from Kiss of Death. "The consummate professional, Richard Widmark made his ripples and waves only on-screen. He had worked with plenty of notorious stars and tempestuous directors, but never wrote a tell-all autobiography, perhaps because he thought that secrets were best kept, not spilled. 'I think a performer should do his work,' he said in 1974, 'and then shut up.' He let his acting do the talking, snarling and giggling. And that was eloquent enough."

"Widmark excelled as a tough guy or a streetwise man who liked to make himself out as smarter and tougher than he really was such as in 1950's Night and the City," writes Edward Copeland. "My personal favorite role of his may be in Samuel Fuller's great Pickup on South Street with another Oscar orphan, Thelma Ritter, giving one of her very best turns."

Night and the City is "a movie that only grows in my estimation with each viewing, largely because of Widmark's brave, spare work in the lead role," writes Vince Keenan. "Performances don't cut any deeper than that one."

"The actor possessed such a glacial resolve and was so seemingly unstoppable in the realization of his intentions that it's strange now to find myself flashing on his many memorable death scenes - gored by a Mexican bayonet as Jim Bowie in The Alamo (1960), erased in the flash of an atomic warhead in The Bedford Incident (1965), falling in a hail of bullets in the line of duty in Madigan (1968), gunned down like a dog in the street in Death of a Gunfighter (1969), poisoned and then aerated by postmortem knife wounds in Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and getting his butt kicked by a mess of bees in The Swarm (1978)," writes Arbogast. "Seems like he was always getting killed. It was a living, I guess."

"He often made sub par films more watchable just with his presence," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "These days actors with Widmark's kind of charisma and versatility are few and far between in my opinion and he'll be missed."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has a clip from Pickup on South Street.

Phil Nugent surveys Widmark's career at ScreenGrab and finds a good quote: "'The older you get, the less you know about acting,' he once said, 'but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.'"

Updates, 3/27: "No matter how far he moved away from Tommy Udo in his long career, even when he played noble characters, that giggling psychopath was always just beneath the surface," writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. More from David Bennun.

"[M]y very favorite Widmark performance is the one he gave as himself at the one and only Telluride Film Festival that I ever attended, back in 1982, when the actor was one of the lifetime-achievement award honorees." Joe Leydon tells the story.

"What we have to look back on is his lifetime of wonderful performances, and that unforgettable visage... a one-man rejoinder to Norma Desmond's line about having faces then," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

Steve-O introduces a handful of clips at Noir of the Week.

Die Zeit offers a photo gallery.

"Screenwise, Widmark is what happens when a bad guy goes respectable and never really fits in," writes Robert Cashill:

But Widmark moved on, freeing himself from typecasting and becoming his own, quintessentially modern, man. The brawny, good guy heroics of his contemporaries, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, were not for him. Nor was he as reflective as Henry Fonda, or as aw-shucks charming as James Stewart. Widmark always tapped into a part of Udo, a strain of anxiety and neuroticism that never entirely went away as he aged into military parts, ranchers, and the like. Cast as a pillar of society, he was skeptical of the pedestal and looked askance at the society, and tried to improve it - eventually. That was what I responded to in Widmark; for his characters, respectability was a giant pain in the ass, but responsibility - to his own personal code, for the group, for a nation beset by the Cold War or killer bees - dictated that he had to make the goddamned effort. Even if it killed him, as it so often did.

Which, in part, is why he's not particularly happy with TCM's April 4 tribute. "No, it won't do."

Updates, 3/30: "[T]hrough much of the 1950s, Mr Widmark moved back and forth - shuttling between heavies and heroes - with a freedom mostly unknown to other performers of the period," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Mr Widmark's richest roles were those that placed him somewhere in the middle - in that great swamp of moral ambiguity that four years of active conflict and a shadowy new cold war had made Americans ready to acknowledge."

"My grandma and several of my relatives met him (and Robert Mitchum and Sally Field and Kirk Douglas) on the set of the 1967 western The Way West, which was shot near their ranch in Christmas Valley, Oregon," recalls Dennis Cozzalio, "and my grandma, who knew how movie-crazed I was even by the age of seven, loved to tell me stories of what they saw on the shoot."

"Shortly after Widmark's death, I contacted Gary Meyer, director of the Telluride Film Festival (whom I'd known as co-founder of Landmark Theatres), to see if Widmark's tribute speech was transcribed anywhere, because I would love to reprint it," notes Jim Emerson. "Those were relatively early days for the Telluride festival (which began in 1974 and seemed much more remote than it is now). Gary couldn't locate the speech (which I remember Widmark reading from notes he produced from his jacket pocket), but he did find some 1983 press coverage, from which I have pieced together the following 'story.'"

Posted by dwhudson at March 26, 2008 12:10 PM