LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Karl Malden: Roles
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Malden resumed his film acting career in the 1950s, starting with The Gunfighter (1950), which followed by Halls of Montezuma (1950). The following year, he starred in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), where he played Mitch, Stanley Kowalski's best friend and started a romance with Blanche DuBois (Vivian Leigh), On the Waterfront (1954), where he played a priest who influenced Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) to testify against mobster-union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). In Baby Doll (1956), he played a power-hungry sexual man who had been frustrated by a teenaged wife. Before and after he arrived in Hollywood, he starred in dozens of films of the late 1950s to the early 1970s, such as Fear Strikes Out (1957), Pollyanna (1960), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Gypsy (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and Patton (1970), playing General Omar Bradley. After his last film, Summertime Killer (1972), roles were harder to find... he also starred in the made-for-television movie The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro (1989) (as Leon Klinghoffer).
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The movie was a labor of love for its star Karl Malden, who saw his role as an opportunity to honor his Yugoslavian heritage. His late father had been a Serbian immigrant who, like many others, had come to the United States with hopes for a better life. Malden’s birth name was Mladen Sekulovich, and though he had been raised in the U.S., he didn’t speak a word of English until he started kindergarten. His success as an actor was a source of pride for his family and a true testament to the American Dream.
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Malden tells in his book how he became acquainted with Ezra Stone on The Aldrich Family when Malden occasionally played a boy friend of Henry's sister. Later, when they were both drafted in WW II, Stone asked Malden to be in his Army production that he was producing for the troops, but Malden declined as he wanted to join Moss Hart's Air Corps show, Winged Victory. Stone used his influence to get Malden into the Army Air Corps where he promptly won a role in Winged Victory.
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Malden has repeated these characterizations with only minor variations in a number of films, most notably Birdman of Alcatraz, Cheyenne Autumn, and Nevada Smith, where he played off the cooler styles of Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, and Steve McQueen respectively. The self-effacing subordination of Mitch in Streetcar ... has been employed successfully in other roles. As Omar Bradley in Patton, for example, he is almost insistently ordinary in a way that contrasts to George C. Scott's obsessive and self-concerned hero.
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