Alan Arkin was an actor of humour and candour who became a fierce screen presence

Tough, unsentimental, witty, gravel-voiced and bullet-headed, Alan Arkin was a wiry character actor and comic presence who had a colossal career on stage, TV and movies. He came from the era of male stars such as Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Ben Gazzara, Robert Duvall and Peter Falk – actors who projected a kind of take-it-or-leave-it pugnacity, integrity and strength. The always sympathetic and technically brilliant Arkin perhaps came into his own late in life, his face and shaven head morphing into a black-comic skull of derision and hilarity as the outrageous old guy who says what he wants because he’s decided he doesn’t care any more what people think … that’s if he ever did care.

In 2006, Arkin won the best supporting actor Academy Award for the part of Edwin Hoover, the chaotic old grandpa with the no-bullshit honesty in Little Miss Sunshine. Edwin is part of a bizarre dysfunctional extended family who hit the road in a VW van to get his little granddaughter Olive (played by Abigail Breslin) from New Mexico to California, where she will compete in a junior beauty pageant in questionable taste called “Little Miss Sunshine”. It is Arkin’s cheerfully unfiltered, unedited grandpa who has the most authentically sunny disposition and keeps saying tactless stuff, having been thrown out of his care home for taking heroin.

After that, he had another best supporting actor nomination for Ben Affleck’s true-life Hollywood satire Argo, about a CIA-sponsored fake movie shoot in Iran whose purpose was to exfiltrate US nationals caught up in the 1979 revolution. Arkin played a grizzled old mogul who helps set up the sting, and his presence provides the bedrock of acid wit and cynicism.

Fiendishly smart … Arkin as the bad guy in Wait Until Dark. Photograph: Warner Bros/Kobal/Shutterstock

In the 1992 movie version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, Arkin played George Aaronow, one of the sweaty and permanently anxious salesman who are terrified of losing their livelihoods. George is pressured by some of the discontented workforce into stealing the firm’s customer-base data and decamping to a rival. As ever, Arkin gave it exactly the right kind of weathered toughness, coming from his theatrical experience – though it might have been more interesting to see him in Lemmon’s lead role, exploring more explicitly the anxiety of the salesman’s dying American dream; or alternatively Arkin could have done something great with the scene-stealing part that went to Alec Baldwin, and the “always be closing” speech that Mamet devised for the film.

Arkin’s early screen appearances were marked out by their technical virtuosity and detail. He got an Oscar nomination for his sinuous Russian sailor in the cold war comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming in 1966; he comes ashore from a sub that has drifted to a vacation resort beach – about as welcome as Spielberg’s shark – and causes havoc with the locals. In Wait Until Dark in 1967, Arkin is the fiendishly smart bad guy who tricks blind Audrey Hepburn into thinking he is different people in order to wheedle information out of her. And another Oscar nomination came for a deaf person in a screen version of Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

But it was probably his performance as Yossarian in Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 in 1970 that began to take him away from these bravura performances, and established the basis for the fierce, unadorned, satirically forthright personality which he was later to cultivate on screen. (Interestingly, he played therapists more than once: including Sigmund Freud in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution in 1976.) In Catch-22 he was the traumatised guy who is arguably too crazy for military service … but then again warfare is so obscenely crazy that sane people are ineligible to participate. The movie was coolly received but Arkin’s full-tilt performance certainly made an impression, and made possible Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest five years later. An Alan Arkin performance was as clenched and purposeful as a fist: he brought humour, flavour and candour to the movies.