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," in which he portrayed Walken's long-lost and resented father.
In the Wild West retelling of "A Christmas Carol," Palance starred as the title character in the movie "Ebenezer, " which premiered on cable in 1998. The classic Charles Dickens story was updated with a protagonist who runs a saloon in the 1870s and snarls, "Christmas, hogwash."
"This Ebenezer Scrooge is no harmless old crank; he's a gun ready to go off -- and that makes his redemption all the more cathartic," a Times reviewer wrote.
Given his customary vile 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. His name is listed with such classic western toughs as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
In reality, the man born Feb. 18, 1919, and named Volodymir Ivanovich Palahniuk hailed not from the West but from the coal 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. He wrote and illustrated a book with the non-villainous title of "The Forest of Love: A Love Story in Blank Verse," which was published in 1996.
Surrounded by art in Rome, where he lived for a number of years making spaghetti westerns, Palance was inspired to take up painting. His artwork, which bore the stamp of Impressionism, had been exhibited about a dozen times, he told the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call in 1999.
Palance maintained a 1,000-acre cattle ranch in California's Tehachapi Mountains and a 500-acre farm near his roots in heavily forested Luzerne County, Pa. His ranch brand was an "H" with a "B" and a "C" woven around it, the initials of the first names of his children, Holly, Brooke and Cody.
It was the farm, he said, that inspired his book about a man's love for a woman and nature.
"Everything I talk about is about Pennsylvania," he said of the prose poem that was published among his paintings and line drawings of trees. "I'm not inspired as much by California."
