Jack Palance, beloved bad-guy actor, dies at 87

LOS ANGELES – Jack Palance, the leather-faced, gravelly-voiced actor who earned Academy Award nominations for “Sudden Fear” and “Shane,” and who finally captured an Oscar almost 40 years later as the crusty trail boss in the 1991 comedy Western “City Slickers,” has died. He was 87.

Palance, who had been in failing health with a number of maladies, died Friday of natural causes in Montecito, Calif., at the home of his daughter Holly.

He was one of the best-loved bad guys in motion picture and television history – the murderous husband in “Sudden Fear” (1952), the creepy gunslinger in “Shane” (1953) and the cantankerous cattle driver Curly in “City Slickers” – and kept acting well into his 80s.

“When it comes to playing hard-bitten cowboys, there could never be anyone better than Jack,” said “City Slickers” director Ron Underwood on Friday. “He was a scary, intimidating guy with a very warm and giving heart.”

Palance’s performance accepting the Oscar may have been more memorable than the star turn that earned it.

Upon winning the award for best supporting actor, he dropped to the stage floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and delighted the audience with vigorous, one-armed push-ups. Septuagenarian actors, he said, must continually prove their virility to keep working in youth-oriented Hollywood.

Equally at home on television, Palance earned an Emmy for his role as a has-been boxer in “Requiem for a Heavyweight” in 1956. And he was still doing quality work on television in the 1990s – notably in the third installment of the Glenn Close-Christopher Walken vehicle “Sarah Plain and Tall” as Walken’s long-lost and resented father.

Given his customary appearance in the black garb of various bad guys in the Old West, there was little wonder that Palance and his pictures easily made 1997’s “The Manly Movie Guide” by David Everitt and Harold Schechter.

In reality, the man born Feb. 18, 1919, and named Volodymir Ivanovich Palahniuk hailed not from the West but from country around Lattimer Mines, Pa., and was a fairly sensitive fellow.

Although he enjoyed raising cattle, he was a vegetarian who had painted abstract landscapes since the 1950s, loved trees and wrote poetry.

The celluloid tough guy, at 6 feet 3 inches and 200 pounds, grew up in coal-mining country. He attended the University of North Carolina on a football scholarship and dropped out to try boxing.

He had a 12-2 record as a professional boxer, and by the 1940s was making $200 a fight.

“Then I thought, ‘You must be nuts to get your head beat in for $200.’ The theater seemed a lot more appealing,” Palance told the Los Angeles Times in 1995.

When World War II came, he served in the Army Air Forces. A bomber pilot who saw little action, he was at the controls when his plane lost an engine and slammed nose-first into the ground. He suffered severe head injuries and required extensive facial reconstruction.

After his discharge, he changed his last name to Palance and resumed his education at Stanford University, studying journalism. He became a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Unhappy with the $35-a-week journalist’s pay, he took the advice of an actress friend and headed for Broadway. Within two weeks, Palance was in a play.