Hollywood legend Alan Arkin dies aged 89

30 June 2023, 15:09 | Updated: 30 June 2023, 16:13

Oscar-winning actor Alan Arkin has died aged 89.

"Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man. A loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather, he was adored and will be deeply missed," his sons Adam, Matthew and Anthony said in a statement.

He died at his home in California, according to Variety.

Arkin was best known for his role in Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, for which he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, despite only being on screen for less than 15 minutes. He played Edwin Hoover, the grandfather of the family.

A member of Chicago's famed Second City comedy troupe, Arkin was an immediate success in films, appearing in the Cold War spoof The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

He received an Oscar nomination for his role in the spoof as well as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1969 and Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Throughout his career spanning seven decades, Arkin worked with directors such as Tim Burton in fantasy romance Edward Scissorhands and Mike Nichols in satirical black comedy Catch-22.

Earlier in his career, in 1963, Arkin won a Tony for Enter Laughing.

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He most recently starred in Netflix's The Kominsky Method alongside Michael Douglas, which earned him Emmy nominations in 2019 and 2020 and Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations in 2020 and 2021.

"I used to think that my stuff had a lot of variety. But I realised that for the first twenty years or so, most of the characters I played were outsiders, strangers to their environment, foreigners in one way or another," he told Associated Press in 2007.

"As I started to get more and more comfortable with myself, that started to shift.

"I got one of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten from someone a few days ago.

"They said that they thought my characters were very often the heart, the moral centre of a film. I didn't particularly understand it, but I liked it, it made me happy."

Other recent credits included Going in Style, a 2017 remake featuring fellow Oscar-winners Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman

Arkin received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019.

Arkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 26, 1934 and his family later moved to LA during his childhood.

His parents found jobs as teachers, but were fired during the post-Second World War era because they were Communists.

He studied acting at Los Angeles City College, California State University and Bennington College in Vermont. He married a fellow student, Jeremy Yaffe, and they had two sons, Adam and Matthew.

After he and Yaffe divorced in 1961, Arkin married actress-writer Barbara Dana, and they had a son, Anthony.

All three of his sons became actors, with Adam, 66, having appeared in Chicago Hope, 8 Simple Rules and Sons of Anarchy.

"It was certainly nothing that I pushed them into," Arkin said in 1998.

"It made absolutely no difference to me what they did, as long as it allowed them to grow."