Multiple Oscar nominee Alan Arkin is one of Hollywood’s most esteemed performers, and has delighted audiences for nearly fifty years. Arkin is also an accomplished composer, musician, and director. His most recent effort is the ensemble comedy “Little Miss Sunshine,” for which he has received a Supporting Actor Oscar nod.
Arkin was born on March 26, 1934 to a Jewish family in New York City. His maternal grandfather was an immigrant from Odessa, and had fled the city years earlier due to rampant persecution of the Jewish population. The family moved to Los Angeles soon after Alan’s birth, where his father David worked as a set designer and art teacher. Unfortunately, like many liberal Jews in Hollywood in the early 1950s, David and Alan’s mother Beatrice were accused of being Communists during the infamous Red Scare, the product of rampant fear of Communist encroachment coupled with not-so-subtle anti-Semitism. David lost work due to his refusal to answer questions about his political affiliations.
During this tumultuous time for the family, the young Alan was cultivating an interest in acting while attending Franklin High School in L.A. before going on to Los Angeles City College and Bennington College in Vermont. He dropped out of the latter school and with two friends formed a folk band, The Tarriers, which reworked a well-known Jamaican calypso song to craft the hit track “The Banana Boat Song” in 1956. Arkin has performed with various other musical acts over the years, including ten years with children’s group The Baby Sitters. He has also written several children’s books and has published numerous science fiction stories.
Arkin’s acting career took off in 1966 with an Oscar-nominated performance in “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming,” making him one of only a few who have received an Oscar nod for their first big-screen appearance. Superb in comedies as well as dramas, he received another Oscar nomination for his sensitive performance in “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” in 1968, the same year that he starred in “Inspector Clouseau,” taking the Pink Panther reins from the legendary Peter Sellers. Some of his other noteworthy performances are in “Wait Until Dark,” “Catch-22,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” and “The In-Laws.”
In recent years Arkin has appeared with Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder in Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands,” alongside Al Pacino and Kevin Spacey in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman in “Gattaca,” and in the Harrison Ford actioner “Firewall,” among others. His performance in the ensemble of “Little Miss Sunshine” (with Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, and newcomer Abigail Breslin) has been something of a return to prominence for Arkin, who will star with Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, and Peter Sarsgaard in the 2007 thriller “Rendition.”