For all the stories we’ve heard lately about celebrities passing before their time, it’s somewhat comforting but still sad to read about an actor living to nearly 100 years. Oscar and Emmy-winning actor Karl Malden, perhaps best known as the American Express pitchman in the 70s who popularized the slogan “Don’t Leave Home Without It” has passed at 97. Malden won an Academy Award for best supporting actor for 1951′s Streetcar Named Desire with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. Most of his film work was in the 1950s and 60s in films that included On The Waterfront, How the West Was Won, and Patton. He eventually moved to television in the 70s, starring in “The Streets of San Francisco.” Malden later won an Emmy in 1984 for the miniseries “Fatal Vision.”

Karl Malden, a versatile Oscar-winning actor who built a six-decade Hollywood career playing heroes and heavies — and, often, relatable ordinary men — yet who was certain he was best known as a commercial pitchman for American Express, has died. He was 97.

Malden died Wednesday of natural causes at his Brentwood home, said Mila Doerner, a daughter.

He received his Academy Award for playing Mitch in the 1951 film “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a role he originated on Broadway. Two decades later, he starred in the 1970s TV series “The Streets of San Francisco” with Michael Douglas, then in his late 20s.

In a statement to The Times, Douglas called Malden a “mentor” whom he “admired and loved” deeply.

For more than 20 years, Malden was the spokesman for American Express travelers checks who turned “Don’t leave home without them” into a national catchphrase in a series of commercials that debuted in 1973.

In a company that has become known for its celebrity spokespeople, Malden “was one of the first and most memorable,” Joanna Lambert, a company vice president, told The Times in an e-mail.

Johnny Carson spoofed Malden’s sober-faced ads on “The Tonight Show,” and Malden often recalled that people were always throwing a version of the tagline — “Don’t leave home without it” — back at him.

With his unglamorous mug — Malden had broken his bulbous nose twice playing sports as a teenager — the former Indiana steel-mill worker realized early on the course his acting career would take.

“I never thought I was salable,” Malden recalled in a 2004 interview. “I learned in my second year of drama school that I was not a leading man — I was a character actor. So I thought, I’d better be the best character actor around.”

In a movie career that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s, Malden played a variety of roles in more than 50 films, including the sympathetic priest in “On the Waterfront,” the resentful husband in “Baby Doll,” the warden in “Birdman of Alcatraz,” the pioneer patriarch in “How the West Was Won,” Madame Rose’s suitor in “Gypsy,” the card dealerin “The Cincinnati Kid” and Gen. Omar Bradley in “Patton.”

The variety of the roles established Malden, former Times film critic Charles Champlin once wrote, “as an Everyman, but one whose range moved easily up and down the levels of society and the IQ scale, from heroes to heavies and ordinary, decent guys just trying to get along.”

Eva Marie Saint, who worked with him in 1954′s “On the Waterfront” and became a good friend, called Malden “a consummate actor.”

He “never changed, he always became the character. If you watch his work, he never falls, there’s never a false move,” she told The Times on Wednesday.

[From The LA Times]

Other celebrities who have lived past their mid 90s include Katharine Hepburn, who passed in 2003 at 96, Bob Hope, who also passed in 2003 at the age of 100, and lovable character George Burns, who lived until the age of 100, leaving us in 1996. RIP Karl Malden, you are remembered fondly. Thank you for gracing us with your talent for so many years.

Here’s a 1976 commercial with Malden:

The pictures of Karl Malden with Kirk and Michael Douglas are from 2004. Thanks to WENN.com for these photos

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