Reserved actor best known for playing disturbed killers

Richard Widmark, who died on 24 March, 2008, aged 93, was an actor who received his Oscar nomination for a debut role in total contrast to his real life persona.

His performance as sinister, callous gangster Tommy Udo in the classic film noir Kiss of Death (1947) marked him out as a master of villainous roles and he was a staple bad guy in Twentieth Century Fox’s canon for many years afterwards.

Yet his murderous and often unhinged characters belied a mild personality and wholesome lifestyle. Sadly he lacked the charisma to become a Hollywood hero, but during the later years of his career he reinvented himself as an esteemed actor with an air of authority.

Richard Widmark was born in Minnesota on 26 December, 1914. His father was a travelling salesman and his childhood was split between various Midwestern states. His first trip to the cinema came at the age of three and Boris Karloff was a boyhood hero, though fear of persecution repressed his early acting ambitions.

Instead he concentrated on a passion for current affairs which culminated in a trip to pre-war Nazi Germany where he shot some documentary footage. When he lectured about his film back in America, he discovered an unknown knack for public speaking. While studying law at Lake Forest College, Illinois, he turned his new-found confidence to acting.

After teaching drama for two years, he moved to New York in 1938. There he found an atypical level of success in radio dramas (including Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre) and Broadway plays, earning as much as $100,000 a year. A perforated eardrum spared him national service during the Second World War and his career continued uninterrupted for nearly a decade.

Despite initially being dismissed by Hollywood for being "too intellectual", Mr Widmark had ambitions to work in movies. When he auditioned for Kiss of Death in 1946, he surprised producer Henry Hathaway by instantly finding a suitably menacing voice and maniacal laugh for Udo, a childlike hoodlum who kills with the cold delight of a school bully.

Despite this being the first time he had played a villain, he was nominated for the 'Best Actor in a Supporting Role' Academy Award, won the Golden Globe for 'Most Promising Newcomer' and was subsequently cast as a disturbed criminal in a string of films like The Street with No Name, Road House (both 1948) and No Way Out (1950).

But Mr Widmark, who had married a high school sweetheart, rarely drank and was more interested in investing his earnings in property than squandering them on a lavish Hollywood lifestyle, and disliked continually playing thieves, psychopaths and racists. Even his heroes, in films such as Slattery's Hurricane (1949) and Panic in the Streets (1950), tended to be flawed and neurotic.

"Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be," he once said. "They think you're playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby."

The problem Mr Widmark found was that, when his seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox expired and he was famous enough to choose his own film roles, his true persona simply wasn't strong enough - he lacked the panache, magnetism and earthy looks of the likes of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

During the late 1950s he primarily appeared in detective films or westerns, including John Wayne's The Alamo (1960), but his heroic characters tended to be somewhat flat, a fact that suggested his range might be oddly limited to the deranged. He also appeared in a number of notable historical dramas, including the Graham Greene-scripted Saint Joan (1957) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), alongside Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster and Marlene Dietrich.

The latter role, Col Tad Lawson, set a new precedent which defined him for the remainder of his career. He turned his austere air to authority figures, playing generals, captains and even presidents, a familiar niche for respected former screen icons, though his films in this period were poor matches for his former glories.

During the 1980s he became increasingly disillusioned with what he saw as anti-intellectualism in Hollywood, the very thing that had delayed his movie career in the ’40s. He made his final appearances in the political thriller True Colors (1991) and an American television film Lincoln (1992).

He was married to Ora Jean Hazlewood, a playwright and screenwriter, for 55 years until her death in 1997. He married Susan Blanchard in 1999 and was survived by her and his daughter Anne from his first marriage.