Richard Widmark, who made an indelible screen debut in 1947 as a giggling sadistic killer and later brought a sense of urban cynicism and unpredictability to his roles as a leading man, has died. He was 93.
Widmark died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn., after a long illness, his wife, Susan Blanchard, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. She said a fractured vertebra Widmark suffered in a fall last year was the beginning of his illness.
“I lost a dear friend, and you don’t have friends like him,” said Karl Malden, who first met Widmark in New York when they were both, he said Wednesday, “hustling for radio work” in the early 1940s. Malden later appeared in five movies with Widmark.
Sidney Poitier, who acted in three films with Widmark, told the Times that Widmark “left his mark as a very fine actor.”
Equally believable playing heavies and heroes, Widmark portrayed a broad range of characters in a film career that spanned more than 70 movies from the late 1940s to the early ’90s.
He played a rabid racist in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “No Way Out” (1950), an obsessed prosecutor in Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), an authoritarian Cold War Navy destroyer captain in James B. Harris’ “The Bedford Incident” (1965) and a tough New York City police detective in Don Siegel’s “Madigan” (1968).
The lean and rugged Widmark, whom director Samuel Fuller once said “walks and talks like no one else,” was known to be equally at home astride a horse — in films including William Wellman’s “Yellow Sky,” John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn” and “Two Rode Together,” John Wayne’s “The Alamo” and the star-studded epic “How the West Was Won.”
But it’s as Tommy Udo, the sadistic New York City gangster in Henry Hathaway’s 1947 film noir crime classic, “Kiss of Death,” that Widmark made what might be his most enduring on-screen impression.
Widmark had been working nearly a decade as a successful New York radio and Broadway stage actor when he was cast in the memorable supporting role that set him on the path to stardom.
“Kiss of Death” starred Victor Mature as a small-time crook and family man who reluctantly informs on his ex-partners to gain parole from prison. But Widmark stole the show as the revengeful Udo, who gleefully ties up an older woman in her wheelchair with a lamp cord and then pushes her down a flight of stairs.
Widmark’s wife Jean died in 1997. He married Blanchard, a longtime friend who was once married to Henry Fonda, in 1999.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Anne Heath Widmark.
