As for his refusal to eat red meat, Palance told the Morning Call: "I've got so many cattle that I didn't want to feel like I was eating them.... Because if you walk amongst the cattle, occasionally you'll find that you have a friend.... These little ones -- they'll run after you like a dog.... "
The celluloid tough guy, at 6 feet 3 and 200 pounds, grew up in coal-mining country but had no intention of becoming a miner. He attended the University of North Carolina on a football scholarship and dropped out to try boxing.
He had a 12-2 record as a professional boxer, and by the 1940s he was making $200 a fight, The Times reported in 1995.
"Then I thought, 'You must be nuts to get your head beat in for $200.' The theater seemed a lot more appealing," Palance told The Times.
When World War II came, he served in the Army Air Forces. A bomber pilot who had seen little action, he was at the controls when his plane lost an engine and slammed nose-first into the ground. He suffered severe head injuries and required extensive facial reconstruction.
"There are some moments you never get over," Palance said in 1995. "That was one of them."
After his discharge, he changed his last name to Palance and resumed his education at Stanford University, studying journalism. He became a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle and worked for a radio station.
Unhappy with the $35-a-week journalist's pay, he took the advice of an actress friend and headed for Broadway. Within two weeks, Palance was in a play.
After appearing in such fare as "Temporary Island" and "The Vigil" and a stint as Marlon Brando's understudy in "A Streetcar Named Desire," he won a "most promising personality" award for his 1950 appearance in "Darkness at Noon."
His theatrical success helped him in Hollywood, where Palance made his film debut in director Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" in 1950. Billed as Walter Palance, he portrayed a fugitive carrying the bubonic plague.
The role earned him a back-handed accolade from columnist Hedda Hopper, who described him as "a man who could play Frankenstein without makeup."
Within two years, he had earned his first Academy Award nomination, as the menacing actor husband of Joan Crawford's playwright in "Sudden Fear."
A year later, he was nominated again for being, in the words of film historian Leonard Maltin, "unforgettable in [the] role of the creepy hired gunslinger" Jack Wilson in "Shane."
