Episode # 29 Guest Star: Martin Balsam

- July 09, 2019

Martin Henry Balsam (November 4, 1919 – February 13, 1996) was an American character actor. He is best known for a number of renowned film roles, including detective Milton Arbogast in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Arnold Burns in A Thousand Clowns (1965) (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), Juror #1 in 12 Angry Men (1957), and Mr. Green in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), as well as for his role as Murray Klein in the television sitcom Archie Bunker's Place (1979–1983).

Martin Henry Balsam was born in the Bronx borough of New York City, to Russian Jewish parents, Lillian (née Weinstein) and Albert Balsam, who was a manufacturer of women's sportswear. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he participated in the drama club. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the German director Erwin Piscator and then served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.

Martin Balsam made his professional debut in August 1941 in a production of The Play's the Thing in Locust Valley. During World War II, he served as a sergeant radio operator in a B-24 in the China-Burma-India theater of operations.

In early 1948, he was selected by Elia Kazan to be a member in the recently formed Actors Studio. Balsam went on to perform in several episodes of the studio's dramatic television anthology series, broadcast between September 1948 and 1950. He appeared in many other television drama series, including Decoy with Beverly Garland, The Twilight Zone (episodes "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine" and "The New Exhibit"), as a psychologist in the pilot episode, Five Fingers, Target: The Corruptors!, The Eleventh Hour, Breaking Point, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Fugitive, and Mr. Broadway, as a retired U.N.C.L.E. agent in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode, "The Odd Man Affair", and guest-starred in the two-part Murder, She Wrote episode, "Death Stalks the Big Top". He also appeared in the Route 66 episode, "Somehow It Gets To Be Tomorrow".

In 1960, he appeared in one of his best-remembered roles as Detective Arbogast in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Along with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, Balsam appeared in both the original Cape Fear(1962), and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Arnold Burns in A Thousand Clowns (1965) and, in 1968, won a Tony Award for his appearance in the 1967 Broadway production of You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running. Balsam also performed the original voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After his lines were recorded, director Stanley Kubrick decided "Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American," and hired Douglas Rain to perform the role for the released film.

In 1951, Balsam married his first wife, actress Pearl Somner. They divorced three years later. His second wife was actress Joyce Van Patten. This marriage lasted for four years (from 1958 until 1962) and produced one daughter, Talia Balsam. He married his third wife, Irene Miller, in 1963. They had two children, Adam and Zoe Balsam, and divorced in 1987. On February 13, 1996, Balsam died of a sudden stroke in his hotel room while vacationing in Rome, Italy. He was 76 years old. He is interred at Cedar Park Cemetery, in Emerson, New Jersey.

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