To most of today’s filmgoers, the name Martin Landau is as remote as Bela Lugosi. Landau is the one-time rising star who appeared in “Mission Impossible” in the 1960s and has since collected two Oscar nominations for best supporting actor in “Tucker” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Lugosi was the actor famous for playing Dracula and other horror parts in movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. What brings them together is that Landau plays Lugosi in Tim Burton’s new wallow in weirdness, “Ed Wood,” about the only male Hollywood director better known for dressing in women’s clothing than for his films.
As Lugosi, who was Wood’s leading actor in such films as “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Landau offers a full-blown depiction of morphine addiction that has already generated Oscar talk. Johnny Depp plays Wood, Bill Murray, another actor, and Sarah Jessica Parker and Patricia Arquette, the women in Wood’s life.
A tall, trim, gray-haired man with bushy black eyebrows, Landau is fascinated with Lugosi. “He was a brilliant actor,” he says. “I grew up watching him. He was always wonderfully over the top.”
After screening 25 Lugosi movies and numerous filmed interviews to prepare for the part, Landau has become very protective of the late horrormeister. Like Lugosi himself, who turned down the chance to play Frankenstein’s monster because he thought the makeup was demeaning, Landau refused to wear a mask.
“I wanted just a little bit of makeup,” he says. His approach to looking like Lugosi was to re-train the muscles in his face. “I open my eyes wide when I get emotional,” Landau says. “Bela closes down. You see a lot of teeth when I smile. When he smiles, there’s this black chasm.”
Landau pulls his upper lip over his teeth to demonstrate how he transformed his appearance. “I consciously learned Bela’s muscles,” he continues. “By the end of the first week, I could have juggled or tap danced as Bela. I didn’t even have to think about it. And this Hungarian accent started coming out of me. Because of his accent and the parts he took-talk about typecasting!”
Landau himself suffers from the opposite of typecasting. Who is he? Is he the ultimate contemptible guy in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”? Is he the supportive businessman in “Tucker”? Is he the master of disguise in “Mission: Impossible”?
“My outline is not that clear,” Landau agrees. “For years that’s been one of my problems. If you cast Joe Pesci, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. It takes a particular kind of director to cast me. If a director wants the performance on the nose, he’ll typecast the part. But if he’s willing to experiment, he’ll call me.”
Landau learned how to play at the prestigious Actors Studio, along with classmate Steve McQueen, the only other student accepted into the program the year Landau joined. In the mid-’50s he worked in live television and the theater and then moved to film when Alfred Hitchcock cast him as a “quiet, contained homosexual” in “North by Northwest.”
After appearing in such fare as “Cleopatra” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” Landau became a regular on “Mission: Impossible” in 1966. It was a decision he would later regret.
” `Mission Impossible’ changed everything,” he says. “Back then, there was a big chasm between TV and film. Film directors felt that audiences wouldn’t pay to see somebody they could see for free on TV.”
Since then, Landau has appeared in dozens of films and one other TV series, the syndicated “Space 1999.” He has taught at the Actors Studio and is currently executive director, along with directors Mark Rydell and Sydney Pollack. But only in the last few years, with his two Oscar nominations, has his career begun to resemble some of his earliest successes.
“Am I bitter?” he repeats. “No. Hey, if I’d have been out of work, maybe, but I’ve never been out of work. I was doing crap for a lot of years, mindless, one-dimensional heavies, where the more you bring to them the worse off you are. I never did anything that would totally embarrass me, no matter how much I needed the money. If something offended me, I turned it down. But some of my things should be turned into guitar picks.”
He doesn’t feel that way about “Ed Wood,” however, and the mood ring on his right hand, a gift from his daughter Juliet, reflects his upbeat attitude. One of those comedy-tragedy theater masks that flips from face to face, the ring is smiling at the moment, as is its owner.
Landau is in his mid-60s but has the enthusiasm of someone half his age. “Johnny Depp told an interviewer that I renewed his belief that you can do something serious and enjoy it,” he says, pleased. “It’s not about the dollar. It’s the work. The best time I have is when I’m working.”
In “Ed Wood,” he and Depp have a father-son relationship, but the roles keep switching. “We’re two disparate human beings who need each other,” Landau says. “It’s sweet.”
Wood, one of Hollywood’s worst directors, was a transvestite, but he wasn’t gay. “He was in the Marine Corps,” Landau says, “and he did go into battle wearing a pink bra and panties under his uniform. I don’t get it, myself. Why do some men want to wear women’s clothing? When Johnny was preparing, he’d go home and put on high heels and angora sweaters to get used to them, but what’s comfortable or attractive about that?”
Landau doesn’t plan to write about his Depp days or his friendship with James Dean or his times teaching acting to Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton. “I don’t want to live my remaining years in the past, writing an autobiography,” he says.
“I’ve got lots to do, and I’d rather live it than write about it.”
