[Palance Picture]

Jack Palance (Walter Palaniuk)
1920 - 2006

Actor Jack Palance: Palance from 'Panic' to 'Pagan'

by M. A. Schmidt, Hollywood

When an actor averages one thousand fan letters a month and more than 75 per cent of the missives come from admiring females, Hollywood producers sit up and take notice. Jack Palance brought seasoned movie masterminds bolt upright in their leather backed swivel chairs by becoming a Mr. Somebody in less than four years without the customary abracadabra ministrations of high-powered studio publicity machines. The rule book for movie popularity went out the window when the dark, menacing 6-foot 4 inch former football player, prize fighter and bomber pilot - his eyes flashing fury and muscles quivering like violin strings - jolted audiences to attention in his first screen appearance, "Panic in the Streets."

According to the rules - and Hollywood pays slavish devotion to the formula for developing new personalities - Palance shouldn't have attained any particular following among the fair sex because he is no glamour boy by any stroke of the retouch artist's brush. His face has a strong, rough quality which is accentuated by the somewhat battered nose, and there is in his bearing, and facial characteristics a suggestion of panther-like, sinister cunning. He is definitely not the accepted type of movie hero. Besides, Mr. Palance committed what should have been - going by the time honored rules - professional suicide. Before he had any inkling that he could make a career out of screen acting, he broke a long-term contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.

Coming Up

Now Hollywood recognizes that this reticent, quiet-spoken product of eastern Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields is growing steadily in boxoffice importance. It also recognizes that ha is a talented and serious actor who asks no more than the opportunity to do his job as well as he possibly can.

He has, after all, been seen in only seven pictures. His biggest role in terms of footage and billing was as Joan Crawford's leading man in "Sudden Fear," a performance which brought him an Academy Award nomination but alas, not the "Oscar." His box office standing soared with that picture and it inched up higher a when "Shane" came along and the cattle men hired him to drill Alan Ladd in a gun duel. His role as Blackie wasn't large, but Palance, aided by the shrewd direction of George Stevens, got another "Oscar" nomination for it. Just recently he played another meaty role - one which carries co-star billing with Jeff Chandler and Ludmilla Tcherina - as Attila the Hun in Universal-International's "Sign of the Pagan." This is his eighth film.

Credo

Mr. Palance's puzzlement over the turn his career has taken stems from his post-war G.I. Bill education days at Stanford University where he turned to acting more as a diversion from studies as an English major who anticipated setting the newspaper world on fire.

The actor doesn't regard himself as being a leading man, either. He is, as he says, "a character role star," and then goes on to define the classification by stating his credo as an actor. "What I must find is a reason for acting - an objective reason," he said, in explaining how he goes about selecting a role.

"I do not believe in acting per se, or in merely doing a solid job of characterization. I'm afraid I believe that anything that is really good must in some way be universal, however subtly or blandly. There must be an attempt on the part of the actor to say something in addition to what the author has said, or better still, to say what the author has said so that it develops a three dimensional meaning. However, if this attempt is obvious and results in anything other than enjoyment for the audience then it is wrong. An actor can never negate an audience. He is working for the audience as well as for his own selfish satisfaction. An actor cannot be selfish."

Mr. Palance has crowded a lot of experiences into the thirty-four years (Feb. 18 is his birthday) since he was born to parents who immigrated from the Ukraine to the little town of Lattimer, Pa., near Hazelton. His father worked in the mines. In 1937, at the age of 17, Jack went to the University of North Carolina on a football scholarship and did a summer vacation turn in the mines himself. Two years later he left school convinced by a fair amount of intercollegiate boxing that he would be the next world heavyweight champion. He practiced the cauliflower art for two years, hitting clubs all the way from Louisville to the Broadway Arena, Brooklyn, and finally decided he "didn't have a real fighter's heart." A broken nose helped to convince him. He lost only two out of twenty fights and held the redoubtable Joe Baksi to a draw.

War Record

By this time the war was on and Palance enlisted in the Air Corps. His second lieutenant's bars still were shiny when a B-24 he was piloting in advance training on submarine patrol off Hawaii crashed on landing after an engine conked out. He remembers a voice saying, as he was pulled from the wreckage, "his head looks like a crushed can." Some four months later a depression in his forehead had been pushed out and he was honorably discharged and on his way to Stanford.

From aspiring actor to actor earning a living was another story, one with its share of hand-to-mouth existence until he understudied Anthony Quinn in the road company of "A Streetcar Named Desire," where he met his wife, Virginia Baker, herself an understudy and later to be hailed by Helen Hayes as one of the theater's most promising young actresses. Mrs. Palance gave up acting to become a mother twice since their marriage in 1949, and now is acting again in television.

She was directly responsible for finding Palance, who had become tired of understudying and disappeared from "Streetcar," when the harried stage manager of the Broadway company sought him to replace Marlon Brando while the latter nursed a broken nose. That appearance brought him to Hollywood for "Panic" and "Halls of Montezuma" for Fox. After breaking his contract with the studio he went back to Broadway for "Darkness at Noon," was lured back to movies for "Shane," which was made previous to but released after "Sudden Fear." Since then Mr. Palance has been commuting between here and New York where he and his family now live.

From: New York Times, March 14, 1954

[space] Item Description Source Date Remarks
[space] Name Palance, Jack (Palaniuk, Walter)
[space] Editor not assigned contact info here n/a n/a
[button] Article Gentle Killer American Weekly July 12, 1953 .
[button] Article Palance Defends Picture Bulletin Dec. 20, 1955 Philadelphia
[button] Article Palance as Bullfighter The Sunday Bulletin Sept. 8, 1957 Philaldelphia
[button] Article Palance to do Miners' Story Bulletin March 1, 1965 Philadelphia
[button] Article Jack the Badman is now Balladeer Daily News Dec. 1, 1970 Philadelphia
[button] Article They Can Do Anything Bulletin Nov. 26, 1972 Philadelphia
[button] Article On the Road with Sammy and Elaine Standard Speaker Oct. 19, 1990 Hazleton, PA
[button] Article Greatest Non-Horror Villain Standard Speaker March 14, 1992 Hazleton, PA
[button] Article Palance Unconcerned about Oscar Standard Speaker March 20, 1992 Hazleton, PA
[button] Page Palance wins Oscar for supporting actor Standard Speaker March 31, 1992 Hazleton, PA
[button] Article Greed Drives Hollywood Standard Speaker Feb. 20, 1993 Hazleton, PA
[button] Article Paths cross at TV writers' affair Standard Speaker Feb. 21, 1994 Hazleton, PA
[button] Article City Slickers II Standard Speaker July 15, 1994 Hazleton, PA
[button] Page Palance's Local Roots Standard Speaker Jan. 21, 1997 Hazleton, PA
[button] Page The push-up poet talks about love Standard Speaker Jan. 21, 1997 Hazleton, PA
[button] Page Palance gets rave reviews from folks at book-signing Standard Speaker Sept. 15, 1997 Hazleton, PA
[button] Article Jack Palance Celebrates Muzeum's Anniversary Straz May 23, 2002 Pinkowski Institute