The characters played by the actor Eli Wallach, who has died aged 98, were seldom good but almost always bad and ugly. The mould was set with his second film, Don Siegel's The Lineup (1958), in which he played a nervous psychotic killer called Dancer. Most memorably, Wallach portrayed Calvera, the bearded, grinning, sadistic bandit chief with gold teeth who terrorises Mexican villagers in The Magnificent Seven (1960). This role led to his being cast as the heavy in several spaghetti westerns a few years later, notably Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).
"On films, my image is the villain," Wallach once declared. "Whereas on stage I play the little man from Rhinoceros, or the little good-hearted, sweet-natured boy Kilroy from Camino Real, or the good-natured truck driver from The Rose Tattoo. So it's the opposite side of the coin."
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