R.I.P. Eli Wallach

UPDATE: Broadway to dim the lights: Theater District marquees will go dark for one minute at 7:45 PM Friday as Broadway marks the passing of Eli Wallach, who died June 24 at age 98. TCM has also set a five-film tribute marathon on June 30 starting at 9 AM ET. The character actor likely was best known as Tuco opposite Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

A lifelong theater actor and all but accidental movie and TV star, Wallach and his wife, Anne Jackson (who survives him), were fixtures of the Broadway and off-Broadway stages, often together and always happy to put their skill and fame in the service of liberal social causes.  In 1951 he was cast opposite Maureen Stapleton in the leading roles of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, as Alvaro Mangiacavallo, a truck driver who woos and wins Serafina Delle Rose, a Sicilian widow living on the Gulf Coast. Both won Tony Awards.
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