LOS ANGELES — Jack Palance, the craggy-faced menace in "Shane," "Sudden Fear" and other films who turned successfully to comedy in his 70s with his Oscar-winning self-parody in "City Slickers," died Friday.
Palance died of natural causes at his home in Montecito, Calif., with his family, said spokesman Dick Guttman. He was 87.
When Palance accepted his Oscar for best supporting actor, he delighted viewers of the 1992 Academy Awards by dropping to the stage and performing one-armed push-ups to demonstrate his physical prowess.
That year's Oscar host, Billy Crystal, turned the moment into a running joke, making increasingly outlandish remarks about Palance's accomplishments throughout the show.
"Winning the Oscar for that movie and the one-arm push-ups he did on the show will link us together forever, and for that I am grateful," Crystal said in a statement Friday.
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Always the iconoclast, Palance had scorned most of his movie roles. "Most of the stuff I do is garbage," he once told a reporter, adding that most of the directors he worked with were incompetent, too.
"Most of them shouldn't even be directing traffic," he said.
Movie audiences, though, were electrified by the actor's chiseled face, hulking presence and the calm, low voice that made his screen presence all the more intimidating.
His film debut came in 1950, playing a murderer named Blackie in "Panic in the Streets." After a war picture, "Halls of Montezuma," he portrayed the ardent lover who stalks the terrified Joan Crawford in 1952's "Sudden Fear."
The role earned him his first Academy Award nomination for supporting actor. The following year brought his second nomination when he portrayed Jack Wilson, the swaggering gunslinger who bullies peace-loving Alan Ladd into a barroom duel in the Western classic "Shane."
That role cemented Palance's reputation as Hollywood's favorite menace, and he went on to appear in such films as "Arrowhead" (as a renegade Apache), "Man in the Attic" (as Jack the Ripper), "Sign of the Pagan" (as Attila the Hun) and "The Silver Chalice" (as a fictional challenger to Jesus).
He also appeared on television in the 1960s and '70s, winning an Emmy in 1965 for his role as an end-of-the-line boxer in "Requiem for a Heavyweight."
