Martin Landau

Martin Landau is an American film and television actor. His career started in the 1950's. Landau is best known for his roles as Rollin Hand in the original Mission: Impossible television series and as John Koenig in the movie Space: 1999.

Roles

Scorpion

Biography

Early life

Landau was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 20, 1928, the son of Selma and Morris Landau. His family was Jewish; his father, an Austrian-born machinist, scrambled to rescue relatives from the Nazis. He attended James Madison High School and the Pratt Institute before finding full-time work as a cartoonist.

Career

Cartoonist

At the age of 17, Landau started working as a cartoonist for the Daily News, illustrating Billy Rose's column "Pitching Horseshoes" and also assisting Gus Edson on the comic strip The Gumps during the 1940's and 1950's, eventually drawing the "Sunday strip" for Edson. (Some sources confuse him with comic book artist Kenneth Landau, and incorrectly claim that he drew for comic books using the name Ken Landau as a pseudonym.) At 22, he quit the Daily News to concentrate on theater acting.

Episodes stared in

• The Sting of the Scorpion

Trivia

• After Martin Landau won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in the 1994 movie Ed Wood he was no longer available to voice Scorpion. Richard Moll was then recast as the voice of Scorpion and voiced him for the rest of the series.