Eli Herschel Wallach (/ˈiːlaɪ ˈwɒlək/ EE-ly WOL-ək; December 7, 1915 – June 24, 2014) was an American film, television, and stage actor from New York City.

Other notable films include How the West Was Won (1962), Tough Guys (1986), The Two Jakes (1990), The Associate (1996), The Holiday (2006), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and The Ghost Writer (both 2010).

[8][9] He gained his first method acting experience at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City, where he studied under Sanford Meisner.

[10] There, according to Wallach, actors were forced to "unlearn" all their physical and vocal mannerisms, while traditional stage etiquette and "singsong" deliveries were "utterly excised" from his classroom.

[13] Wallach took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School in New York City with the influential German director Erwin Piscator.

There, he studied more method acting technique with founding member Robert Lewis, and with other students including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Herbert Berghof, Sidney Lumet, and his soon-to-be wife, Anne Jackson.

[21] In 1945 Wallach made his Broadway debut and he won a Tony Award in 1951 for his performance alongside Maureen Stapleton in the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo.

[22] His other theater credits include Mister Roberts, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Camino Real, Major Barbara (in which director Charles Laughton discouraged Wallach's established method acting style),[22] Luv, and Staircase, co-starring Milo O'Shea, which was a serious depiction of an aging homosexual couple.

[23] He exposed Americans to the work of playwright Eugène Ionesco in plays including The Chairs and The Lesson in 1958, and in 1961 Rhinoceros opposite Zero Mostel.

[3] Wallach and Jackson became one of the best-known acting couples in the American theater, as iconic as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn,[22] and they looked for opportunities to work together.

In 1978 they played in a revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, along with their daughters, and in 1984 they acted in Nest of the Wood Grouse, directed by Joseph Papp.

Director Elia Kazan however, set explicit limits on Wallach's scenes, telling him not to actually seduce Carroll Baker, but instead to create an unfulfilled erotic tension.

The scene on the swing with Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker in Baby Doll is my exact idea of what eroticism in films should be.

[30]Wallach went on to a prolific career as "one of the greatest 'character actors' ever to appear on stage and screen", notes Turner Classic Movies,[31] acting in over 90 films.

[27] Having grown up on the "mean streets" of an Italian American neighborhood,[32] and his versatility as a method actor, Wallach developed the ability to play a wide variety of different roles, although he tried to not get pinned down to any single type of character.

"[31] Some of his other films included The Lineup (1958); Lord Jim (1965) with Peter O'Toole; a comic role in How to Steal a Million (1966), again with O'Toole, and Audrey Hepburn; and as Tuco ("the Ugly") in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, followed by other Spaghetti Westerns, such as Ace High.

At one point, Henry Fonda had asked Wallach whether he himself should accept a part offered to him to act in a similar Western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which would also be directed by Leone.

[37] Wallach and Eastwood became friends during the filming of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and he recalled their off-work time together: "Clint was the tall, silent type.

Producer Harry Cohn and director Fred Zinnemann were "dazzled" by Wallach's screen test and wanted him to play the part.

Wallach said that when he learned that the play had finally received financing, he "grabbed" the opportunity: "It was a remarkable piece of writing by the leading playwright in America and it was going to be directed by the country's best.

[44] He played Gus Farber in the television miniseries Seventh Avenue in 1977, and 10 years later, at the age of 71, he starred alongside Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven episode "A Father's Faith".

Three years later, he played aging mob boss Don Altobello in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III.

[45] A few years prior to that event, Kate Winslet told another audience that Wallach, with whom she acted in The Holiday in 2006,[46] was one of the "most charismatic men" she'd met, and her "very own sexiest man alive.

Wallach plays a Holocaust survivor who, in a meeting, teaches a self-consumed and preoccupied young man that life can change in a moment.

[26][44] Katherine Wallach told The New York Times that Anne Jackson died on April 12, 2016, aged 90, at her home in Manhattan.