Actor Eli Wallach Dies At 98

There were very few who thought of multifaceted actor Eli Wallach as “old.”

The longtime East Hampton resident was joyous, passion-driven and deeply compassionate. He was liberal to the bone. He thrived on attention, racking up close to 200 acting credits on both the big screen and Broadway stage.

And while he loved performing, he loved his family more.

Surrounded by his wife, Anne Jackson, and three children—Peter, Katherine and Roberta—Mr. Wallach died on Wednesday, June 25, in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 98.

“My dad would have loved to take this call himself and tell you all his stories,” his son said during a recent telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania. “Everyone adored him. When he passed away, the doormen in the building all came over and hugged me. Who does that?”

Over the last five decades, Mr. Wallach was a beloved face around the East End—whether he was attending a family celebration at Gosman’s Dock in Montauk after a day of deep-sea fishing, or sailing around Sag Harbor with college friend Walter Cronkite before stopping into Village Hardware, for which he had a surprising affection. He had a fierce backhand on the tennis court and wasn’t bad at baseball either, often catching in the famous Artists & Writers softball game.

Whenever he could, he escaped to Italy to visit his daughter, Katherine. He stayed active, swimming twice a week in either the ocean, bay or family pool up until a month before he died.

“I keep thinking, ‘Loss?’ It was a gift. I had this incredible gift of this amazing man,” the younger Mr. Wallach said. “I can’t wrap my head around ‘a loss,’ because then I’ll cry. All I want to do is celebrate and watch all the films over again and see all the nuances. And make sure I’m half as good a dad to my kids as he was to me.”

Born on December 7, 1915, Mr. Wallach grew up in Red Hook, a very tough section of Brooklyn, in a candy store run by his father, Abraham Wallach. He was surrounded by Italians, his son explained, which is why he was “so apt at playing mafiosos.”

“He could inhabit and become any character he played,” Mr. Wallach said, “everything from little old Jewish guys to godfathers to Mexican bandits. I thought I was the son of a Mexican bandit until I was, like, 7 years old.”

Mr. Wallach and his sisters are the products of a Hollywood rarity: a 67-year marriage. In 1948, their father was auditioning for an off-Broadway production of “This Property Is Condemned” by Tennessee Williams when he met the beautiful Ms. Jackson.

He may have been convinced, but she wasn’t. “He’s not right for the part,” she had said at the time. “He’s too old.”

Of course, he landed the role, and they starred opposite one another—planting the seed for 15 Broadway collaborations and what would grow into one of the longest relationships in the biz. At the 1998 Welcome Back to Brooklyn Festival, the couple was named the “King and Queen of Brooklyn,” nearly 10 years after they helped found Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. The organization’s 99-seat second theater is named in their honor.

“Eli and Annie never missed a show,” Executive Director Tracy Mitchell reported during a recent telephone interview. “A couple of years ago, he came in and he was walking a little bit slower than normal. ‘Eli, how are you doing?’ I asked him. He poked me with his cane and goes, ‘I’m great! I just finished four films this year.’ ‘Four films? Eli, aren’t you, like, 96 years old?’”

She laughed at the memory and continued, “Most people in their 90s, well, they lived a long life. But I never thought of Eli as being ‘up there,’ because he wasn’t—except by a number. He was a fixture here. He was American theater royalty.”

Mr. Wallach appeared in scores of roles, continuing his film work well into his 90s, from 2006’s “The Holiday” to “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” in 2010.

He broke into the industry playing Italians, but it wasn’t long before he was portraying all walks of life, from Mafia dons to Mexican bandits—notably his iconic role in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” a project he sometimes found himself defending for director Sergio Leone.

A number of years ago, Mr. Wallach was giving a lecture at The New School in Manhattan when one bold student stood up and asked him, “Mr. Wallach, as an actor of your skill and accomplishment, how could you lower yourself to do those awful spaghetti westerns?”

The whole room went silent, and Mr. Wallach’s eyes turned red—a rare sight for his young son, who was sitting in the crowd, as his father rarely showed anger.

“I like the way you think I should live my life by your ideals,” the actor responded, gravely.

Again, the room grew quiet, before erupting into applause.

“After my dad hit him with that line, it was like a scene out of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” Mr. Wallach recalled. “He was well over 6 feet tall, and he shrank down to 2 inches.”

Mr. Wallach was political, always stood up for the artist and devoted himself entirely to his roles. He was the “god of character actors,” according to director Bob Balaban, an actor himself, who lives in Bridgehampton. There was no “Eli Wallach” role, he said. The man did it all—“beautifully, seamlessly, effortlessly,” he said.

“I got used to the fact that he simply was never going to die,” Mr. Balaban said of the late actor during a recent telephone interview. “I thought, “Maybe he’ll get to 115. I was disappointed he wasn’t 115—but 98 is a lot of years. He seemed so happy in his older age.”

And for the most part, he was, just as long as his neighbors weren’t using their leaf blowers, or the fireworks at Main Beach—that he once loved so much—weren’t too loud, his daughter, Katherine Wallach, reminisced during a recent telephone interview from her home in Manhattan.

He was perfectly content sitting in his backyard, a line of suntan lotion on his nose, catching a few rays, she said, or “tooling around on his noodle” in the pool.

He may have gotten crankier with age, she said, but he was never less gracious and never lost his spunk. In 1995, on stage accepting an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, he ended his speech with a dirty joke. That’s who he was, his son said—always ready to meet anyone and speak candidly.

“When you talked to him, it was this way about him, as if he was going to be your best friend from that moment on,” Ms. Mitchell recalled. “I didn’t really known him as Eli the Actor. I knew him as Eli, the Friend of Bay Street. And it was always Annie and Eli, never just Eli. That’s how I want to remember them. Bay Street will miss him forever.”

In lieu of donations, the Wallachs ask that his family, friends and fans remember him the way he would have wanted—through his films and his autobiography, “The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage,” which will be soon released as an audio book, read by the man himself.

“I know he was an amazing actor and such, but he was such an amazing dad,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t mean to cry. I’m not unhappy, I promise. It’s more passion than anything.”

In the days following Mr. Wallach’s death, flags were lowered to half staff in Italy. The marquee lights of New York’s Broadway theaters dimmed for one minute on Friday, June 27, at 7:45 p.m.—pausing to remember one of the industry greats and, above all, a family man.