Death doesn't take a holiday

Every year, it seems to me, editors and writers in print and digital outlets want to complete their year-end wrap-ups a little earlier. In fact, I’m pretty sure there were Thanksgiving leftovers still relatively fresh in my refrigerator when Entertainment Weekly released its “Late Greats” cover-story tribute to showbiz luminaries who shuffled off this mortal coil in 2009.

But here’s the thing: Over the years, I have noticed that, during the last week of every December, long after the year-end wrap-ups are complete, another notable or two (or three or four) will join the Choir Invisible. And, unfortunately, these folks tend to get penalized for their untimely departures. For openers: When the bad news is broken on cable news networks, they get tributes only from B- and C-list talking heads, because the A-listers are on holiday. For much the same reason, the newspaper and magazine obits are scanty, because only second- and third-stringers – many of them too young to fully appreciate many older notables -- are still on the job.

(Maybe this is why, when Philippe Noiret died on Thanksgiving Day in 2006, my respectful tribute to the great French actor attracted more readers to this blog than almost anything else I've ever posted, before or since.)

Worse, the late celebrities leave this world too late to be included prominently in the really cool year-end newspaper, magazine and website tributes. And, really, they’re disqualified from being honored in wraps for the following year. As a result of their underpublicized departures – well, I have only anecdotal evidence to support this theory, but I suspect that, in many cases, the general public isn’t actually aware that an individual has died until the dead person pops up in one of the montages at the Emmys and Oscars.

Consider these dates of departure, chosen at random during a cursory riff through Wikipedia: Dean Martin, Dec. 25, 1995. Eartha Kitt, Dec. 25, 2008. (Hell, for that matter, Charlie Chaplin, Dec. 25, 1977.) Jason Robards, Dec. 26, 2000. Alan Bates, Dec. 27, 2003. Hal Ashby, Dec. 27, 1988. Sam Peckinpah, Dec. 28, 1984. Jerry Orbach and Susan Sontag, Dec. 28, 2004. Andrei Tarkovsky, Dec. 29, 1986. (OK, I realize that’s a bit of a reach, but still…) Lew Ayres, Dec. 30, 1996. Rick Nelson, Dec. 31, 1985. Donald Westlake, Dec. 31, 2008.

And now think about this: The odds are very good that, between now and 11:59 p.m., Dec. 31, at least one more significant showbiz figure will check out. And will not get the send-off he or she deserves.

R.I.P.: Karl Malden (1912-2009)

As Robert Berkvist of the New York Times astutely notes, Karl Malden "was perhaps the ideal Everyman. He realized early on that he lacked the physical attributes of a leading man; he often joked about his blunt features, particularly his crooked, bulbous nose, which he had broken several times while playing basketball in school. But he was, he once said, determined 'to be No. 1 in the No. 2 parts I was destined to get.'"

In achieving that goal, A.O. Scott adds, Malden "defined what it meant to be a character actor" as he "specialized in being uneasy, playing men who are variously worried, angry, disappointed and defeated. Like many other actors who distinguish themselves in supporting roles and whose charisma consists of a kind of intensified ordinariness, he has often been referred to as an everyman. That doesn’t seem quite right, though. In his best movie roles, mainly in films directed by Eliza Kazan" -- including A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he earned an Oscar as, naturally, Best Supporting Actor -- "Mr. Malden is specifically the other man, the guy defined partly by his lack of certain attributes abundantly present in the protagonist. The other man is never ruthless, or dangerous, or dashing, or cool. His regret may be that he could never have been a contender, but he makes up for it with a stoical sincerity that is all the more affecting for being so easy to discount."

Like many other character actors who have garnered fame and acclaim in movies, Malden didn't achieve full-blown stardom until he turned to television -- as a hard-boiled but good-hearted veteran cop in The Streets of San Francisco (where he served, on camera and off, as a mentor to co-star Michael Douglas), a blunt-spoken steel-mill worker and family man in the unjustly overlooked Skag, and, of course, the sharp-dressed pitchman for traveler's checks and credit cards you should never leave home without. But no matter the size of the role, or the medium in which he played it, Malden invariably came across as effortlessly and absolutely convincing. Even when he went over the top in two '60s spy-guy extravaganzas -- Murderer's Row (1966), which cast him as a wild-eyed Dr. Evil type opposite Dean Martin's Matt Helm, and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), where he played the embezzling underling of a zealously right-wing Texas zillionaire thwarted by Michael Caine's Harry Palmer -- he somehow managed to maintain a modicum of credibility. That, too, is a hallmark of a natural-born character actor.

The ten carols of Christmas: No. 5

Dino has the yule blues...