Karl Malden - Film Career: 1950s To 1970s

Film Career: 1950s To 1970s

Malden resumed his film acting career in the 1950s, starting with The Gunfighter (1950) and Halls of Montezuma (1950). The following year, he was in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), playing Mitch, Stanley Kowalski's best friend who starts a romance with Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). For this role, he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Other films during this period include Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess with Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter (1953), 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 teenage wife. He starred in dozens of films from 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 Summertime Killer (1972), he appeared in the made-for-television film The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro (1989) (as Leon Klinghoffer).

Malden’s wife, Mona, the former Mildred Greenberg, graduated from Roosevelt High School in Emporia, Kansas where she attended Kansas State Teachers College, now Emporia State University. He first visited the campus with her in 1959 and was impressed by the ESU Summer Theatre. He returned in the summer of 1964 to teach, working with the actors in the company. Upon leaving, he gave his honorarium to establish the Karl Malden Theater Scholarship still given today.

In 1963, he was a member of the jury at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival.