OBITUARY: Academy Award-winning actor Jack Palance, 87 (11/19/06)

OBITUARY: Academy Award-winning actor Jack Palance, 87

by Matthew Dubas

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - Jack Palance, Academy Award-winning Ukrainian American actor, died of natural causes at his daughter's home in Montecito, Calif., on Friday, November 10. He was 87.

He was born Volodymyr Ivanovych Palahniuk on February 18, 1919, in a coal-mining town in the Lattimer Mines section of Hazle Township, Pa. He was the third of five children of Ukrainian immigrants John, who came from the village of Ivane Zolote in southwestern Ukraine and became an anthracite coal miner, and Anna (née Gramiak) Palahniuk, who was born in the Lviv region.

The young Palahniuk excelled at sports and earned a football scholarship to the University of North Carolina, but left after two years due to his disgust for the commercialization of the sport.

At 6-feet-4 and 210 pounds, Walter Palahniuk decided to pursue boxing, but quit after two years, after a blow to his Adam's apple, with a professional record of 12-2. In 1942 he joined the Army Air Corps, and during a training flight in Tucson (some say California) it was alleged that his B-24 lost power shortly after takeoff, he bailed out and the plane crashed nose-first into the ground. He suffered head trauma, facial burns and lacerations that required extensive reconstructive surgery and was discharged in 1944.

Mr. Palance described the plastic surgery story as an invention of studio publicists: "If it is a 'bionic face' why didn't they do a better job of it? The only plastic surgery I've ever had in my life was a 10-minute operation to open my nasal passages because my nose had been broken during my career as a heavyweight boxer."

The GI Bill of Rights provided his tuition at Stanford University, where Mr. Palahniuk studied journalism, joined the drama club and appeared in 10 comedies. He changed his name to Palance and left school after graduating in 1949 with a B.A. in journalism to try acting professionally in New York. Shortly after graduating, Mr. Palance married Virginia Baker (the marriage lasted from 1949 to 1966), and they had three children Holly, Brooke and Cody.

His Broadway debut came in a comedy, "The Big Two," where he had but one line, spoken in Russian. The play lasted a few weeks, and Mr. Palance took odd jobs as a short-order cook, a waiter, a lifeguard and a hot dog vendor in between roles in the theater.

His big break came when he was chosen as Anthony Quinn's understudy in the road company of "A Streetcar Named Desire," then replaced Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski on Broadway.

Mr. Brando, who was also into athletics, rigged a punching bag in the theater's basement and invited Mr. Palance to join him. One night, Mr. Palance missed the bag and punched Mr. Brando in the nose, sending him to the hospital. Mr. Palance maintained that making his own "big break" was an accident.

The high-profile role earned him a contract with 20th Century-Fox and the show's director, Elia Kazan, chose him in 1950 for "Panic in the Streets," his first film debut, where he played a murderer named Blackie who was infected with the bubonic plague.

Mr. Palance earned his first Academy Award nomination in 1952 for best supporting actor in the role of the homicidal husband opposite Joan Crawford in "Sudden Fear." The following year, his second nomination came when he played Jack Wilson, the swaggering gunslinger in the Western classic "Shane."

Also appearing on television, he won an Emmy in 1957 for his portrayal of an end-of-the-line boxer in Rod Serling's 1956 movie "Requiem for a Heavyweight." Other television roles included him and his daughter Holly as hosts on "Ripley's Believe It or Not" in the 1980s, a starring role in the series "The Greatest Show on Earth" as the circus boss Johnny Slate, and his role as police detective Lt. Alex Bronkov in the crime-drama "Bronk."

Reinvigorating his film career, he appeared in the 1988 movie "Young Guns" with his son Cody and in 1989 in Tim Burton's "Batman." Cody Palance died in 1998 at the age of 42 from a malignant melanoma. Mr. Palance hosted The Cody Palance Memorial Golf Classic to raise awareness and funds for a cancer research center in Los Angeles.

Four decades after his film debut, Mr. Palance won an Academy Award for best supporting actor on March 30, 1992, for his performance as cowboy Curly Washburn in the 1991 comedy "City Slickers." In a maneuver that will be forever remembered, he stepped onstage to accept the award, looked at his diminutive co-star Billy Crystal and said, "I crap bigger than him." He then dropped to the floor and demonstrated his ability at age 73 to keep up with younger actors by performing several one-armed push-ups.

In the 1950s, while he was living in Rome filming "spaghetti westerns," he painted abstract landscapes and wrote poetry. He wrote and illustrated "The Forest of Love: A Love Story in Blank Verse" about a man's love for a woman and nature; the book was published in 1996.

Although he was a vegetarian, Mr. Palance maintained a 1,000-acre cattle ranch in California's Tehachapi Mountains and the 500-acre Holly-Brooke farm in Luzerne County, Pa. His cattle ranch was used for camp outings by Plast Ukrainian scouts.

Mr. Palance was extensively involved with the Ukrainian community and its causes. In 1966, on his first visit to Soyuzivka, Mr. Palance was a panel judge in the annual Miss Soyuzivka contest, where he announced to the audience his plans to produce and star in the film "Mazepa" to be filmed in Yugoslavia the next spring.

An interview with Mr. Palance, conducted by Walter Sochan, a UNA executive officer who was also a free-lance correspondent for Voice of America, was beamed to Ukraine on the radio's Ukrainian program. Mr. Palance told his Ukrainian listeners that his family traced its roots to a village in western Ukraine, where there were very many Palahniuks.

In 1986 Mr. Palance was honored by the Ukrainian Institute of America at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as Ukrainian of the Year. That same year, Mr. Palance provided narration for a documentary commissioned by the Ukrainian National Association, "The Helm of Destiny," about Ukrainian immigrants in America and the UNA's founding. The film was made by Slavko Novytski.

At a fund-raising dinner in 1996 for the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund (today known as the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund) at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Center in South Bound Brook, N.J. Mr. Palance, the national spokesperson for the fund, was a featured guest speaker who helped bring awareness to the cause.

At the dinner he said, "Chornobyl is not the sort of thing you can capture in a sound bite or a 30-second commercial. The victims are not neatly gathered in one location where you can count the bodies and calculate the damage."

He also challenged the United States to take a more active financial role in cleaning up the mess. "If this country helped rebuild Germany after the Nazi regime and rebuilt Japan ... then why shouldn't we help rebuild Ukraine, which was the victim of one of the most bloody and tyrannical regimes in history?" asked Mr. Palance. "Why shouldn't we work to save the lives of innocent children in Ukraine who are on the front lines of this global environmental crisis that everyone claims to care so much about?" (Excerpts from his address appeared in the February 11, 1996 issue of The Ukrainian Weekly.)

In December of 1999 Mr. Palance was involved in a project to form a Ukrainian media organization called The Hollywood Trident Group, whose goal was to raise the media profile of Ukraine and gain recognition of the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933.

In a demonstration of his pride for his Ukrainian heritage, Mr. Palance in 2004 rejected an award by the Russian Ministry of Culture naming him "narodny artyst," or National Artist, the country's highest artistic award.

At the awards ceremony Mr. Palance said: "I feel like I walked into the wrong room by mistake. I think Russian film is interesting, but I have nothing to do with Russia or Russian film. My parents were born in Ukraine: I'm Ukrainian. I'm not Russian. So excuse me, but I don't belong here. It's best if we leave." His entourage and members of The Hollywood Trident Group proceeded to leave the ceremony.

In addition to his daughters Holly Palance and Brooke Palance Wilding, Mr. Palance is survived by his second wife Elaine Rogers Palance, his brother John, his sister Anne and three grandchildren Lilly, Spencer and Tarquin.

As this Kozak-cowboy rides off into the sunset, may his memory be eternal.

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