In Memoriam Portrait: Oscar Winning Actor Alan Arkin Dies at 89

Submitted by PatrickMcD on July 2, 2023 - 7:56pm

SAN MARCOS, Calif – There was an Alan Arkin for every generation. Post World War Two adults may have seen him at Chicago’s “The Second City.” Baby Boomers remember his films “Wait Until Dark” and “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming” and Gen X saw him in “The In-Laws” (“Serpentine, Shel”), “Glengarry Glen Ross” and his Oscar winning turn in “Little Miss Sunshine.” He even did a Netflix series, “The Kominsky Method.” For every generation, for every form of acting, there was Alan Arkin. He passed away on June 29th, 2023, at the age of 89.

Alan Wolf Arkin was born in Brooklyn, and started acting at age 10. After not graduating from two colleges he joined The Second City in 1960 Chicago, one year after it was founded. His feature film debut was the musical “Calypso Heat Wave” (1957), he debuted on Broadway in a Second City revue and did episodic TV during the 1960s. His breakthrough came in “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming” in 1966, and he followed up with “Wait Until Dark” (1967), “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” (1968) and the lead role in “Catch-22” (1970).

Alan Arkin in Chicago circa 2012
Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com

He portrayed the nebbish dentist in the first iteration of “The In-Laws” (1979), hilariously opposite Peter Falk, and started his character run in familiar favorites like “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992), “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1996) and “Jacob the Liar” (1999). “Little Miss Sunshine” (2004) began his last phase, and he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He continued working right up to his passing, as he was a familiar presence in “Argo” (2012), “Going in Style” (2017) and as the voice of Wild Knuckles in “Minions: The Rise of Gru” (2022).

Besides “The Kominsky Method” for Netflix, he was the title character for a short-lived sitcom on ABC-TV called “Harry” (1987) and was the voice of J.D. Salinger on the cult cartoon “BoJack Horseman” (2015). He also was in a folk group called The Tarriers in the 1950s, and they scored a hit with “The Banana Boat Song,” a reworking that went to Number Four on the Billboard Charts.

Arkin is survived by his wife Suzanne Newlander, and three sons, including actor and director Adam Arkin. He passed away at his home in San Marcos, California. Alan Arkin was photographed in 2012 by Joe Arce at the Chicago International Film Festival.

His epitaph could appropriately be one of his philosophies, as he once said, “Either you’re growing or you’re decaying; there’s no middle ground. If you’re standing still, you’re decaying.”

Source for this article is from wikipedia.com. Alan Arkin, 1934-2023.