Martin Balsam

Early life and education

Martin Henry Balsam was born on November 4, 1919 in the Bronx borough of New York City to Russian Jewish parents Lillian (née Weinstein) and Alberto Balsam, who was a manufacturer of shampoo. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School where he participated in the drama club. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the German director Erwin Piscator and then served in the United States Army Air Forces from 1941 to 1945 during World War II, achieving the rank of sergeant. He served as a sergeant radio operator in a B-24 in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations.

Career

Theatre

Balsam made his professional debut in August 1941 in a production of The Play's the Thing in Locust Valley. After World War II, he resumed his acting career in New York.

From 1947 to 1949, Balsam was a resident member of the summer stock company Town Hall Players in West Newbury, Massachusetts, a community-sponsored summer theatre. In early 1948, he was selected by Elia Kazan to be a member in the recently formed Actors Studio. He appeared consistently in Broadway and off-Broadway plays. Columnist Earl Wilson dubbed him "The Bronx Barrymore".

In 1968, he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance in the 1967 Broadway production of You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running.

Television

Balsam performed in several episodes of Actors Studio, the studio's dramatic television anthology series, broadcast from September 1948 to 1950. He appeared in many other television drama series, including Decoy; the Route 66 episode "Somehow It Gets to Be Tomorrow"; The Twilight Zone in the 1958 pilot episode "The Time Element" and the episodes "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine" and "The New Exhibit"; Five Fingers; Target; The Corruptors!; The Eleventh Hour; Breaking Point; Alfred Hitchcock Presents; The Fugitive; Mr. Broadway; The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Murder, She Wrote.

He played Dr. Rudy Wells when the Martin Caidin novel Cyborg was adapted as a TV movie pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man (1973), but he did not reprise the role for the subsequent series. In 1975, he appeared as James Arthur Cummins in the drama Mitchell. He appeared as a spokesman/hostage in the TV movie Raid on Entebbe (1976) and as a detective in the TV movie Contract on Cherry Street (1977). He also appeared on an episode of Quincy, M.E. Balsam starred as Murray Klein on Archie Bunker's Place for two seasons (1979-1981) and returned for a guest appearance in the show's fourth and final season.

Film

Balsam made his film debut with an uncredited role in On the Waterfront (1954), directed by his Actors Studio colleague Elia Kazan. Balsam played an official of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey investigating mob involvement in the city's waterfront unions. His breakthrough role came a few years later, when he played Juror #1 in 12 Angry Men (1957). He worked twice more with the film's director, Sidney Lumet in The Anderson Tapes (1971) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

In 1960, he appeared in as private investigator Arbogast in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Along with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, Balsam appeared in both the original Cape Fear (1962) and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Arnold Burns in A Thousand Clowns (1965). Balsam also performed the original voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He told a journalist in August 1966 "I'm not actually seen in the picture at any time, but I sure create a lot of excitement projecting my voice through that machine. And I'm getting an Academy Award winner price for doing it, too." After his lines were recorded, director Stanley Kubrick decided "Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American," and he hired Douglas Rain to perform the role for the released film.

Balsam also appeared in the films Time Limit, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Carpetbaggers, Seven Days in May, The Bedford Incident, The Man, Hombre, Catch-22, Tora! Tora! Tora! (as Admiral Husband E. Kimmel), Little Big Man, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, All the President's Men, The Delta Force, and The Goodbye People. One of his later appearances was in the 1994 parody The Silence of the Hams, which paid homage to his role in Psycho.

Beyond Hollywood, Balsam was a popular character actor in Italian films, beginning in 1960 when he starred in the Luigi Comencini film Everybody Go Home. He starred in several poliziottesco films throughout the 1970s, directed by Fernando Di Leo and Enzo G. Castellari. Balsam's roles in these films were be re-dubbed into Italian, but he looped his own lines in the English-language export versions. Balsam maintained close ties to Italy even after the end of the poliziottesco trend, starring in the Italian-produced television series Ocean and La piovra.

Personal life

In 1951, Balsam married his first wife, actress Pearl Somner. They divorced three years later. His second wife was actress Joyce Van Patten. This marriage lasted for four years (from 1958 until 1962) with one daughter, Talia Balsam. He married his third wife, Irene Miller, in 1963. They had two children, Adam and Zoe Balsam, and divorced in 1987.

Death

On February 13, 1996, Balsam died of a stroke in his hotel room while vacationing in Rome, Italy. He was 76 years old. He is interred at Cedar Park Cemetery in Emerson, New Jersey.