Alan Arkin, Oscar-winning character actor known for Little Miss Sunshine and Argo, dead at 89

Alan Arkin, an American character actor who won an Oscar in 2007 for his role in the family comedy-drama Little Miss Sunshine, has died, a representative confirmed to CBC News. He was 89.

His sons Adam, Matthew and Anthony Arkin also confirmed their father’s death in a statement on Friday.

“Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man,” they said. “A loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather, he was adored and will be deeply missed.”

The statement did not include a cause of death. He died in California on Thursday, the representative said.

A member of Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe, Arkin was an immediate success in movies with the Cold War spoof The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, and peaked late in life with his win as best supporting actor for Little Miss Sunshine, a surprise 2006 hit.

More than 40 years separated his first Oscar nomination, for The Russians are Coming, from his nomination for playing a conniving Hollywood producer in the Oscar-winning Argo.

In recent years he starred opposite Michael Douglas in the Netflix comedy series The Kominsky Method, a role that earned him two Emmy nominations.

More than 100 film and TV credits

Arkin once joked to The Associated Press that the beauty of being a character actor was not having to take his clothes off for a role. He wasn’t a sex symbol or superstar, but was rarely out of work, with over 100 television and feature film credits to his name.

His trademarks were likability, relatability and complete immersion in his roles, no matter how unusual, whether playing a Russian submarine officer in The Russians are Coming who struggles to communicate with the equally jittery Americans, or standing out as the foul-mouthed, drug-addicted grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine.

“Alan’s never had an identifiable screen personality because he just disappears into his characters,” director Norman Jewison of The Russians are Coming once observed.

“His accents are impeccable, and he’s even able to change his looks…. He’s always been underestimated, partly because he’s never been in service of his own success.”

While still with Second City, Arkin was chosen by Carl Reiner to play the young protagonist in the 1963 Broadway play Enter Laughing, based on Reiner’s semi-autobiographical novel.

In Arkin’s next major film, he proved he could also play a villain, however reluctantly. Arkin starred in Wait Until Dark as a vicious drug dealer who holds a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) captive in her own apartment, believing a drug shipment is hidden there.

He recalled in a 1998 interview how difficult it was to terrorize Hepburn’s character.

“Just awful,” he said. “She was an exquisite lady, so being mean to her was hard.”

The 1968 film The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which he played a sensitive man who could not hear or speak, again elevated Arkin’s status in Hollywood. He starred as the bumbling French detective in Inspector Clouseau that same year, but the film would become overlooked in favour of Peter Sellers’s Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies.

‘The moral centre of a film’

Arkin’s career as a character actor continued to blossom when Mike Nichols, a fellow Second City alumnus, cast him in the starring role as Rossarian, the victim of wartime red tape in 1970’s Catch-22, based on Joseph Heller’s million-selling novel.

Through the years, Arkin turned up in such favourites as Edward Scissorhands, playing Johnny Depp’s neighbour, and in the film version of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross as a dogged real estate salesman. He and Reiner played brothers, one successful (Reiner), one struggling (Arkin), in the 1998 film The Slums of Beverly Hills.

“I used to think that my stuff had a lot of variety. But I realized that for the first 20 years or so, most of the characters I played were outsiders, strangers to their environment, foreigners in one way or another,” he told The Associated Press in 2007.

“As I started to get more and more comfortable with myself, that started to shift. I got one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten from someone a few days ago. They said that they thought my characters were very often the heart, the moral centre of a film. I didn’t particularly understand it, but I liked it; it made me happy.”