The Elephant Outside the Room

When a celebrity dies I am hesitant to write about it. Yet, I'm sure everyone knows who I'm talking about and I might as well address it.

He may have looked a bit different than other celebrities. He was certainly his own person. His career was on the quiet side for the last while yet his prime was enough to keep him embedded in our memories.

I'm talking, of course, about Karl Malden, who died on Wednesday at the age of 97.

Eric D. Snider wrote the following for Cinematical.com:

Karl Malden, an Oscar- and Emmy-winning actor and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, died of natural causes today in Los Angeles at the age of 97. His long life and successful career were virtually free of scandal or controversy, and as an actor he was by all accounts a consummate professional. He and his wife, Mona, who survives him, were married for 70 years, which might literally be a show-business record.

Robert Berkvist, in his laudatory obituary in The Times wrote:

Mr. Malden never forgot his beginnings as a son of immigrants, nor did he lose his perspective. Not long after his Oscar-winning work with Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar,” he referred to himself as probably “the only ex-milkman Vivien ever kissed in a movie.” In an interview nearly a half-century later, he said he thought of an actor’s work as “digging ditches.” “Sometimes they’re deep and sometimes they’re shallow,” he said, “but we keep digging them.”

I got the news (and the obituaries i cited) via The Week, a source I just became aware of.