The world lost a giant of the screen yesterday, when acting legend Karl Malden died of natural causes in his Brentwood, California home at the age of 97. We would like to take this opportunity to bid farewell and pay tribute to Malden with a look back over his impressive life and career.

To many, Malden may have seemed a curious candidate for stardom, with his stocky build, balding pate, and famously huge nose (which grew increasingly large when he broke it multiple times playing basketball). He certainly never stood in line to become a screen heartthrob, per contemporaries Marlon Brando or Paul Newman, but he parlayed his average looks into a decades-long string of everyman character roles, rendered on each occasion with a kind of quiet intensity that brought weight and emotional power to dozens of skilled interpretations, and won him legions of fans. Although Malden rose out of the method acting environment that wrought a new era of realism in American cinema, and took classes at the Group Theater and Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, he blatantly rejected the idea of any formalized approach to acting and later reflected in his autobiography: “I do have a method – any method that works.”

Karl Malden began life in Gary, Indiana circa 1912, amid humble beginnings – as Mladen Sekulovich, the son of a Serbian immigrant steelworker who later drove a milk truck. Early on, Mladen followed in the steps of his father by working in a steel mill, and handled occasional milk deliveries, but he soon discovered that his passion lay in the theater. Revealing a formidable amount of self-determination, he set out for Chicago’s legendary Goodman Theater with a few hundred dollars in his pocket that he planned to use to study acting; in addition to following through on these plans, he built sets at the Goodman and used the money to support himself and pay for additional schooling. For a time, it looked as though Sekulovich would be forced to permanently return to Gary and hit the milk route, but rescue came in the form of an invaluable connection with playwright Robert Ardrey, whom Sekulovich had met in Chicago. Ardrey wrote Mladen a letter, inviting him to come to New York and audition for a forthcoming play. That never happened as planned (the play itself went unproduced), but while in Manhattan, Malden auditioned for Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman and landed his first stage role: four lines in the Group Theater’s production of The Golden Boy. He also developed a lifelong friendship with legend-in-the-making Kazan; the latter encouraged him to change his name to the more Anglicized Karl Malden. Thus began the young man’s journey through stage and film roles.

Following Malden’s World War II service, work came quickly and furiously. 1947 represented a breakthrough year for the burgeoning actor – the year that witnessed him landing stage roles in All My Sons (as the son of a profiteer played by Ed Begley, Sr.) and the seminal Tennessee Williams gothic A Streetcar Named Desire, in a role as Mitch alongside Marlon Brando’s brutish Stanley Kowalski. In both instances, he made audiences sit up and take notice, and from there, it represented merely a short leap into the 1951 film version of Streetcar (for which Malden won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and the 1954 Best Picture winner Waterfront.

A third collaboration between Malden, Williams, and Kazan – the 1956 Baby Doll – gave the censors fits, with its tale of a middle aged lecher (Malden) and his nymphette wife (Carroll Baker) who sleeps in a crib and sucks her thumb, and the Sicilian seductor (Eli Wallach) who turns the marriage upside down. It also drew a less-than-glowing critical response. But it kept Malden in the limelight, and received a host of Oscar nominations.

In the years to follow, Malden continued to rack up a formidable series of roles in A-list features. Some of the more prominent included Brando’s directorial debut One-Eyed Jacks (1961), The Great Impostor (1961), How the West Was Won (1962), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Ken Russell’s Harry Palmer outing Billion Dollar Brain (1967).

The 1970s brought Malden a substantial amount of attention on the small screen. He starred for several seasons (1972-77) as Detective Lieutenant Mike Stone on the police drama The Streets of San Francisco (opposite a young Michael Douglas), and in a series of now iconic advertisements for American Express that found Malden imploring viewers: “Never leave home without it.” The actor continued to work steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s, though his profile diminished and the quality of individual projects occasionally waned – witness Malden’s roles as a NASA director in the poorly-conceived disaster picture Meteor (1979), a wealthy gangster in the sequel The Sting II (1983) and a child molester father in the execrable Martin Ritt courtroom drama Nuts (1987). But as variable as some of these projects were, Malden’s acting levels never once flagged, and indeed, he deservedly won critical raves late in his career for his portrayal of a father-in-law hell-bent on justice in the telemovie Fatal Vision (1984). In his final decade, he lent a fine guest starring role to an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s series The West Wing.

From 1989 to 1992, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made Malden its President - a fitting tribute to one of the heavyweights of film acting. He drew on that status in 1999, when he urged the Academy to award an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan despite the opposition of many who remembered the director’s much-maligned decision to testify on the House Unamerican Activities Committee. The effort succeeded.