Also as per the WNN page on Facebook:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-karl-malden2-2009jul02,0,5658128.story
Oscar-winning actor Karl Malden dies at 97
Malden
starred in TV's 'The Streets of San Francisco' and made famous the
American Express catchphrase 'Don't leave home without it.' He appeared
in more than 50 films over his long career.
By Dennis McLellan
12:17 PM PDT, July 1, 2009
Karl Malden, one of Hollywood's strongest and most versatile supporting
actors, who won an Oscar playing his Broadway-originated role as Mitch
in "A Streetcar Named Desire," died today. He was 97.
Malden starred in the 1970s TV series "The Streets of San
Francisco" and was the longtime American Express traveler's-check
spokesman, warning travelers to not leave home without it. He died of
natural causes at his home in Brentwood, said his daughter Mila Doerner.
With his unglamorous mug -- he broke his bulbous nose twice
playing sports as a teenager -- the former Indiana steel-mill worker
realized early on the course his acting career would take.
"I was so incredibly lucky," Malden once told The Times. "I knew I
wasn't a leading man. Take a look at this face." But, he vowed as a
young man, he wasn't going to let his looks hamper his ambition to
succeed as an actor.
In a movie career that flourished in the 1950s and '60s, Malden played
a variety of roles in more than 50 films, including the sympathetic
priest in "On the Waterfront," the resentful husband in "Baby Doll,"
the warden in "Birdman of Alcatraz," the outlaw-turned-sheriff in
"One-Eyed Jacks," the pioneer patriarch in "How the West Was Won,"
Madame Rose's suitor in "Gypsy," the card dealerin "The Cincinnati Kid" and
Gen. Omar Bradley in "Patton."
His varied performances established Malden, former Times film
critic Charles Champlin once wrote, "as an Everyman, but one whose
range moved easily up and down the levels of society and the IQ scale,
from heroes to heavies and ordinary, decent guys just trying to get
along."
Malden was a longtime holdout to television until he agreed to
play Lt. Mike Stone on the ABC police drama "The Streets of San
Francisco," with Michael Douglas. The series, which ran from 1972 to
1977, earned Malden four consecutive Emmy nominations as lead actor in
a drama series.
When he finally won his sole Emmy, it was for outstanding
supporting actor in a limited series or special, as a man who begins to
suspect that his daughter was murdered by her husband in the fact-based
1984 miniseries "Fatal Vision."
Malden also starred in "Skag," a short-lived 1980 NBC dramatic
series in which he played a Serbian family man and union foreman at a
Pittsburgh steel mill.
But for all his movie and television roles, it was primarily the
series of American Express traveler's-check commercials Malden made
between 1973 and 1994 that gave him his greatest public recognition.
(Even Johnny Carson, complete with fake proboscis, dark suit and
short-brimmed fedora, spoofed Malden's sober-faced commercials on "The
Tonight Show.")
"After 50 years of doing all those other things in the business,
wherever I go, the one thing people will say to me is, 'Don't leave
home without it,' " Malden said in 1989. "What am I going to say? It's
kind of frustrating in a way, but at the same time, American Express
has been very good to me, and it's given me independence. I don't have
to jump at anything and everything that comes my way."
He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912, the son of
an immigrant mother from the nation that later became Czechoslovakia
and a Serbian father, who delivered milk for 38 years.
Malden spoke little English until after his family moved from
their Serbian enclave in Chicago to the steel-mill community of Gary,
Ind., when he was 5.
Malden's father was a theater lover who staged Serbian plays in
the church and in Serbian patriotic organizations in Gary. As a
teenager, Malden played heavies -- usually Turks, complete with a big,
black mustache -- in his father's productions.
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