Richard Widmark, who made an indelible screen debut in 1947 as a giggling sadistic killer and later brought a sense of urban cynicism and unpredictability to his roles as a leading man, has died. He was 93.
Widmark died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn., after a long illness, his wife, Susan Blanchard, told The Times on Wednesday. She said a fractured vertebra that Widmark suffered in a fall last year was the beginning of his illness.
"I lost a dear friend, and you don't have friends like him," said Karl Malden, who first met Widmark in New York when they were both "hustling for radio work" in the early 1940s and later appeared in five movies with him.
"He was a damn good actor," Malden told The Times. "He knew what he was doing, he could do it well, and he hated anyone he worked with who wasn't prepared, because he came ready to go."
Sidney Poitier, who acted in three films with Widmark, told The Times that Widmark "left his mark as a very fine actor."
"His creative work is indelible on film and will be there to remind us of what he was as an artist and a human being," Poitier said.
Equally believable playing heavies and heroes, Widmark portrayed a broad range of characters in a film career that spanned more than 70 theatrical and television movies from the late 1940s to the early '90s.
He played a rabid racist in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "No Way Out" (1950), an obsessed prosecutor in Stanley Kramer's "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961), an authoritarian Navy destroyer captain during the Cold War in James B. Harris' "The Bedford Incident" (1965) and a tough New York City police detective in Don Siegel's "Madigan" (1968).
The lean and rugged Widmark, who director Samuel Fuller once said "walks and talks like no one else," was known to be equally at home astride a horse -- in films such as William Wellman's "Yellow Sky," John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" and "Two Rode Together," John Wayne's "The Alamo" and the star-studded epic "How the West Was Won."
But it's as Tommy Udo, the sadistic New York City gangster in Henry Hathaway's 1947 film noir classic, "Kiss of Death," that Widmark made what may be his most enduring on-screen impression.
Widmark had been working nearly a decade as a successful New York radio and Broadway actor when he was cast in the memorable supporting role that set him on the path to stardom.
