--- description: For two-thirds of a century this Actors Studio graduate Infused his characters with rich humanity or a rascally villainy, and forged an enduring romantic and professional partnership with his wife Anne Jackson title: Remembering Eli Wallach: The Good, the Bad and the Gifted image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt84728f04fe56ba6e/6986993b13c79f596d192cd7/119588311.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [movies](/tag/movies/) ## movies Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Eli Wallach: The Good, the Bad and the Gifted by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Jun 25, 2014 6:07 PM CUT  Eli Wallach as Tuco in Sergio Leone's 1966 film, 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.' Eli Wallach as Tuco in Sergio Leone's 1966 film, 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.'Silver Screen Collection—Getty Images by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Jun 25, 2014 6:07 PM CUT “Actually I lead a dual life,” Eli Wallach once said. “In the theater, I’m the little man or the irritated man, the misunderstood man.” But in films, “I do seem to keep getting cast as the bad guys.” If the former role, he played the enthusiastic Italian lover in Tennessee Williams’ _The Rose Tattoo_, for example, which earned him a 1951 Tony award. As for the latter, he was a bad guy with brio in the Williams–Elia Kazan collaboration _Baby Doll_, and Calvera, the bandit chased by the vigilantes of _The Magnificent Seven_. Above all, he was poor cunning Tuco in Sergio Leone’s _The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_, destined for a triangular shootout with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef. For Wallach, that double life was long — he died Tuesday at 98 in New York City — and full of achievement. A student of acting guru Lee Strasberg, and a founding member of the Actors Studio, he shone on Broadway in plays by Ibsen (_The Lady from the Sea_), Shaw (_Major Barbara_) and Shakespeare (_Anthony and Cleopatra_, _King Henry the VIII_) and in modern works by Williams (_Camino Real_) and Eugene Ionesco (_Rhinoceros_). **(READ:** [**Lights To Be Dimmed on Broadway for Eli Wallach**](http://time.com/2927832/the-night-the-lights-went-out-on-broadway-eli-wallach-and-a-short-history-of-the-ultimate-actors-honor/ "undefined")**)** Often Wallach costarred with Anne Jackson, whom he met in 1946 when they played in yet another Williams drama, the one-act _This Property Is Condemned_. Married for 66 years, they forged the ideal acting complement — her sugar to his spice. They perked up the 1968 Hollywood sex comedy _How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life_, with Wallach as a married philanderer, Jackson as his mistress and Dean Martin as the friend who moves in on Jackson. They were a frequent, welcome sight on TV drama (Michael Landon’s _Sam’s Son_) and, as their earthily glamorous selves, showing up on _What’s My Line_ and _Laugh-In_. But their enduring love was the stage, where Wallach and Jackson reigned in Murray Schisgal’s _The Typists and the Tiger_ and _Luv_, and as the parents in a 1978 revival of _The Diary of Anne Frank_, with their daughters Roberta and Katherine in the roles of Anne and Margot. **(READ: TIME’s** [**obit for Eli Wallach**](http://time.com/2920117/versatile-actor-eli-wallach-dies-at-98/ "undefined")**)** Unlike his Method brethren, Wallach didn’t go for tragic grandeur; he was not one to mumble or mope. The men he played could be evil — sometimes pure evil, like his psycho-killer Dancer in Don Siegel’s 1958 crime drama _The Lineup_ — but they usually enjoyed their venality, revealing a smile behind the scowl. TIME critic Richard Schickel, writing in The New York _Times_, said that Wallach’s “essential screen character is a curiously lovable combination of slyness and bluster. There’s something uncalculated, even sometimes something pre-moral and childlike in these whirlwind performances.” For all his Method training, Wallach had the born showman’s gift of communicating to audiences the pleasure he got from acting. For much of his movie career, this New York-born son of Jewish immigrants was typed as Italian, Spanish or Mexican. In the 1956 _Baby Doll_, Wallach’s first movie role, his Silva Vacarro radiates a practiced sexuality, luring teen bride Carroll Baker from her oafish husband Karl Malden. Five years later Wallach, as the cowboy Guido, competes with Clark Gable for the affections of Marilyn Monroe in John Huston’s _The Misfits_, written by Monroe’s estranged husband Arthur Miller; both of Wallach’s costars would be dead within a year.  Eli Wallach (right) with Josh Brolin in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." 20th Century Fox He was Poncho, a member of Edward G. Robinson’s gang, in the casino-heist film _Seven Thieves_, and the Latin American dictator Valdez in _Kisses for My President_, an airy 1964 comedy that dared to imagine a woman (Polly Bergen) as Commander-in-Chief. Bringing silky menace to men of dark power, Wallach played Mafia dons in the 1974 _Crazy Joe_ (with Peter Boyle as Joey Gallo) and _The Godfather Part III_. And once in a while, he even played Jews; his last feature-film role was as Julie Steinhardt, patriarch of finance, in Oliver Stone’s 2010 _Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps_. As a student at the University of Texas at Austin, before serving in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, Wallach had learned to ride horses. That expertise paid off in a Hollywood that still loved the Western. _The Magnificent Seven_, a 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s _The Seven Samurai_, cast him as the bad guy that the septet of good guys (Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholtz) spend most of the film pursuing. Calvera is such a miscreant that he regrets leaving the villagers whose food he keeps stealing enough money to hire their heroic posse. “Sooner or later,” he mutters, “you must answer for every good deed.”  American actor Eli Wallach (foreground, left), as the bandit leader, Calvera, in 'The Magnificent Seven', directed by John Sturges, 1960\. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images) Silver Screen Collection—Getty Images **(READ: Corliss on** [**the long life of the Hollywood Western**](http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1664187,00.html "undefined")**)** Wallach was the scourge of California as the outlaw Charlie Gant, facing a showdown with lawmen Malden and Lee J. Cobb in the 1963 epic _How the West Was Won_, based on a _Life_ magazine series. And when Leone launched the “spaghetti Western” craze with _A Fistful of Dollars_, Wallach was the first American movie star to lend his luster to the genre. (Eastwood, the hero of the _Dollars_ trilogy, had been languishing in the TV series _Rawhide_; and Van Cleef was until then a flinty supporting villain.) In _The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_, three tough men search together or separately for $200,000 in gold coins: Eastwood the good Blondie, Van Cleef the bad Angel Eyes and Wallach the ugly Tuco — an illiterate outlaw who smells “like a pig.” **(FIND:** **_The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_** **on** [**the all-TIME 100 Movies list**](http://entertainment.time.com/2005/02/12/all-time-100-movies/slide/all/ "undefined")**)** Among the three, Tuco is both the only human character and the movie’s bitter comic relief. “I like big fat men like you,” he tells one imminent victim. “When they fall they make more noise.” While taking a bubble bath in his hotel room, he is surprised by a one-armed man with a gun. Tuco pulls a revolver from under the suds and kills the man, saying, “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Yet Tuco can be quite chatty, forever aphorizing about “two kinds of people in this world” to Blondie’s simmering annoyance. This brigand may not be as wily as he thinks he is, but Leone loved him enough to let him survive the famous shootout and still be hanging around, so to speak, at the end. A huge worldwide hit, _The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_ is widely considered Leone’s masterpiece; Quentin Tarantino put it at the top of his all-time list of spaghetti Westerns. The movie also assured Wallach of more Western roles, both in Hollywood (_Mackenna’s Gold_, _Romance of a Horsethief_) and abroad (Duccio Tessari’s _¡Viva la muerte…tua!_, Giuseppe Colizzi’s _Ace High_). **(READ:** [**Quentin Tarantino and the spaghetti Western**](http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/08/quentin-tarantino-the-hateful-eight-script/ "undefined")**)** The actor dismissed his work in spaghetti Westerns as “a means to an end,” telling the _Times_ in 1973, “I go and get on a horse in Spain for 10 weeks, and I have enough cushion to come back and do a play.” Perhaps he suspected that those movies robbed him of gravitas. In the first generation of movie actors schooled by Strasberg (including McQueen, Malden, Cobb, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Rod Steiger), Wallach was one of the few who never received even a nomination for an Academy Award — though in 2010, at 94, he was given an honorary Oscar for “effortlessly inhabiting a wide range of characters, while putting his inimitable stamp on every role.” Toward the end of his two-thirds of a century on stage and in the movies, Wallach must have realized that those Italian Westerns had earned him lasting renown. He titled his 2005 autobiography _The Good, the Bad and Me_ — an apt summary for an actor who was so good at playing bad. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/2920984/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-gifted/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/2920984/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-gifted/"},"headline":"Eli Wallach: The Good, the Bad and the Gifted","datePublished":"2014-06-25T18:07:29.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:08:12.773Z","description":"For two-thirds of a century this Actors Studio graduate Infused his characters with rich humanity or a rascally villainy, and forged an enduring romantic and professional partnership with his wife Anne Jackson","url":"https://time.com/2920984/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-gifted/","keywords":["movies","remembrance"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt84728f04fe56ba6e/6986993b13c79f596d192cd7/119588311.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt84728f04fe56ba6e/6986993b13c79f596d192cd7/119588311.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"The Good, The Bad And The Ugly","caption":"The Good, The Bad And The Ugly","creditText":"Silver Screen Collection—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/2920984/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-gifted/","name":"Eli Wallach: The Good, the Bad and the Gifted"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Actor Eli Wallach Dies at 98","description":"Eli Wallach was a versatile character actor, known for his roles in films like “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “The Magnificent Seven.” He was 98 years old.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/o2gyDuwB/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-06-25T17:56:22.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/o2gyDuwB.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/2920984/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-gifted/","duration":"PT1M42S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/2920984/eli-wallach-the-good-the-bad-and-the-gifted/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```