Jack Palance, who died on Friday in California at the age of 87, was one of the most striking screen presences for half of the cinema's history.
He was 6ft 4in and had a magnificent physique that derived from his years as a coalminer in Pennsylvania - he'd followed his Ukrainian-American father down the pit - and as a professional boxer. His greatest performance is reckoned to be as the washed-up prizefighter in the 1956 TV film Requiem for a Heavyweight. Palance's gaunt appearance, with the strong jaw, wide forehead, high cheekbones, deeply sunken eyes, concave nose and taut skin was partly natural, and partly due to plastic surgery after he was severely burnt while training as a bomber pilot in the Second World War.
After gaining stage experience he went to Hollywood in 1950 and immediately established himself in genre movies of the action variety, usually playing heavies. His deep, even voice conveyed deadly threat and his cold smile carried more menace than other actors' scowls.
His first movie, Elia Kazan's noir classic Panic in the Streets (1950), in which he played a plague-carrying killer in New Orleans, was followed by Lewis Milestone's war film Halls of Montezuma, starring as a boxer in the marines, George Stevens's western Shane, where he was the hired killer dressed all in black, and Douglas Sirk's widescreen epic Sign of the Pagan, in which he played the first of his sinister historical heavies, in this case Attila the Hun. A three-film collaboration with the tough, anarchic Robert Aldrich gave him the chance to play decent men at the end of their tether in Attack! (a Second World War officer at odds with his corrupt seniors), The Big Knife (a liberal movie star confronting brutal studio boss Rod Steiger), and Ten Seconds to Hell (an idealistic architect working in bomb disposal in post-war Berlin).
There were unforgettable scenes in his pictures - most famously, perhaps, the gunning down of the cocky Southerner, played by perennial fall-guy Elisha Cook Jr, outside the saloon in Shane, and as the wild Hollywood producer bullying Fritz Lang in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris (1963). From the late 1960s, after co-starring with Lee Marvin in the elegiac western Monte Walsh, he worked steadily, often on the continent. The films were mostly undistinguished until the comeback in Tim Burton's Batman and the Ron Underwood comedy City Slickers (1991). In the latter he justly won an Oscar as the ageing trail boss Curly, a role to which he brought dignity and ironic humour as well as 40 years of performing on both sides of the law in westerns. At the Oscar ceremony he towered over Billy Crystal, his co-star in City Slickers, who was master of ceremonies, and demonstrated his fitness at the age of 73 by doing one-handed press ups while holding his Oscar in the other hand.
