Alan Arkin Dead at 89: Actor Was a Comic Great from ‘The Russians Are Coming’ to ‘Argo’

Acting legend Alan Arkin is dead at age 89. His publicist confirmed the news to IndieWire.

The Oscar, Tony, Emmy, BAFTA, SAG, and Golden Globe winner passed away at his home.

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Perhaps best known for his roles in “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, Arkin began his acting career in 1957 — and ended up with a body of work of startling range. Arkin was an early member of the Second City comedy troupe and starred on Broadway with his Tony-winning turn in 1963’s “Enter Laughing.”

His film breakout was via comedy as well: in his first major onscreen role in Norman Jewison’s 1967 Cold War caper “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” he plays the “political officer” on a Soviet submarine that runs aground on a small New England island of only 200 residents. The sub’s captain, too embarrassed to radio the motherland for help, sends a nine-person away-team to the island to try to get help there: a trawler, perhaps, that can dislodge them from the rocks. Arkin plays his political officer character, a fanatic, with true borscht-and-balalaika relish. When a little boy behind a screendoor at his house thinks Arkin is not to be trusted, Arkin menacingly slides two fingers down the screen in a failed attempt to act fatherly — think Sacha Baron Cohen as Erran Morad. Arkin received his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor for the role.

Arkin leveraged that menace outright in “Wait Until Dark” as a black-leather clad drug dealer who’s convinced that Audrey Hepburn, who plays a blind woman, has his extremely valuable stash of drugs in her possession. Based on a play, it’s a one-room thriller that Arkin lords over with god-like villainy.

By 1968, Arkin replaced Peter Sellers as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in the “Pink Panther” films and showed his dramatic chops in an Oscar-nominated performance for “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” The role earned Arkin a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor.

Arkin frequently collaborated with director Mike Nichols, both for play “Luv” and later film “Catch-22.” Arkin’s comedic side was central in his directorial debut “Little Murders” starring Elliott Gould. Arkin went on to direct the Broadway production of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” for which he received a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play nomination.

Arkin’s TV career included roles in “St. Elsewhere” and “The Muppet Show” across the 1980s. He later received two Emmy wins for “The Kominsky Method” in 2018 and 2019 (and his final appearance on screens big or small was in a 2021 “Kominsky” episode), as well as lent his voice to “BoJack Horseman.”

Famous film roles additionally include cult favorite “Gattaca,” “America’s Sweethearts,” “Grosse Point Blank,” “Mother Night,” and “The Pentagon Papers.”

Arguably, Arkin’s greatest career highlight was his 2006 turn as a wise-cracking grandfather in indie film “Little Miss Sunshine” co-starring Abigail Breslin, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, and Paul Dano. Arkin made history as the then-sixth oldest winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar at age 72. It had been 37 years since his previous nomination. He said during his Oscar acceptance speech that he was “deeply moved by the open-hearted appreciation our small film has received, which in these fragmented times speaks so openly of the possibility of innocence, growth, and connection.”

Arkin went on to receive his fourth Oscar nomination with Ben Affleck’s “Argo.” Arkin also published multiple novels and memoirs.

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