“You got no guts! Finish me!” the bullet ridden outlaw yells out to the departing avenger. As Karl Malden’s baddie is left in the trail dust to lick his wounds and live with his own guilty conscience, all of nature’s sounds are deafened by his voice booming in the canyon as he curses Steve McQueen’s Nevada Smith who rides off into the hills.

    No matter the character, no matter the genre, it is hard to miss the zest and brilliance with which acting pro Karl Malden delivers his performance. In a career spanning seven decades across radio, theater, film and television, Malden did more than give life to his characters. He gave them meaning. There is an unmistakable quality about a scene when Malden steps into it, and films like Birdman of Alcatraz with Burt Lancaster, The Cincinnati Kid with Edward G. Robinson, and Patton with George C. Scott, are all the more enjoyable because Karl Malden is present.

    Born Mladen Sekulovich on March 22, 1912 in Chicago, Illinois to Serbian immigrants, Karl Malden worked in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana where he was raised, after missing out on a college basketball scholarship that became unavailable during the years of the Depression. “We were manufacturing train and streetcar wheels,” says Malden. “I worked in the open hearth. It’s a dangerous job and you did it carefully. The sparks would fly and there was hot metal going all over the place, like molten lava. It was hell. I worked there for three years after high school and I knew I couldn’t do that for the rest of my life. I had to get out of there.”

    Get out of there he did. The one-time altar boy and church choir singer had aspirations to one day play on a bigger stage to a bigger audience. So in September 1934, against the wishes of his father who warned him of the pitfalls of the acting profession, the young hopeful headed for Chicago and was granted a scholarship at the Goodman Theater where he would meet and act with Mona Greenberg, “the most beautiful student there,” Malden confirms, and who would become his wife for life. This December will mark their 68^th anniversary—the longest matrimonial union in Hollywood history next to Bob and Dolores Hope’s 69-year marriage.

    From Chicago, Malden paved his way to New York where he found steady work—a whopping 24 plays in 20 years! “I got some good reviews,” recalls Malden, “and there were a lot of failures. But I was glad to be working.” During this period Malden somehow managed to squeeze in a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, and then back to the stage the hard-working actor went. Then Hollywood beckoned, and from that point on, the world would get to know, love and respect the 6’2’’ energetic actor with the trademark Slavic nose that endured further shaping, getting broken twice on the basketball court while in high school. “Everybody always looks at my face and asks me how I became an actor,” Malden says with a chuckle. “I knew I wasn’t handsome, so I figured I better work hard and know my business well.”