Richard Widmark; Film, TV Actor Was Known for Enormous Range

His bosses eventually recognized his versatility: In Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" (1950), he was the Public Health Service doctor who tracks down a criminal carrying the plague around New Orleans. In "Don't Bother to Knock" (1952), he was an airline pilot easily seduced by a mentally disturbed babysitter (played by Marilyn Monroe in one of her key early parts).

He once said Monroe was "God-awful to work with. Impossible, really." He said she shut herself in her dressing room, appeared nervous when she came out and seemed constantly distracted, behavior that contrasted with Mr. Widmark's low-key demeanor and devotion to craft.

Mr. Widmark said his fame in "Kiss of Death" at 33, an older age than when most leading men achieve success, spurred a lifelong wariness of celebrity culture.

"I never thought I was a star," he once told a reporter. "I always figured I was a working actor waiting for the next job." Fame, he also said, "was all baloney and could blow away in a minute."

His idol was Spencer Tracy, with whom he appeared as the resentful son in "Broken Lance" (1954) and as the American prosecutor to Tracy's judge in "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961). He said Tracy was the "greatest listener in this business," working deceptively hard at making each line appear natural.

One of Mr. Widmark's last hits was Don Siegel's "Madigan" (1968), a remake of Akira Kurosawa's "Stray Dog" (1949). He played Daniel Madigan, a police detective who single-mindedly hunts down a man who stole his gun. The film set a standard for later movies about distressed cops, such as Siegel's "Dirty Harry."

"I suppose I wanted to act in order to have a place in the sun," Mr. Widmark told the New Yorker. "I'd always lived in small towns, and acting meant having some kind of identity."

He was born Dec. 26, 1914, in Sunrise, Minn., to a salesman and his wife. The family settled in Princeton, Ill., where Mr. Widmark played football, wrote for the school paper and was active in his school drama club. A moviegoer since his grandmother first took him at age 3, he said he always wanted to be a film actor.

He was a speech and political science graduate of Lake Forest College in Illinois, and he taught in the school's drama department. A classmate helped him get a job on a New York radio show, "Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories," and soon he was getting bigger radio and theater parts.

He performed regularly in the 1940s after a perforated eardrum exempted him from military service during World War II.

He said he specialized in portraying "young, neurotic guys" on radio, which led to his being cast in "Kiss of Death." Twentieth Century Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck hired him as Udo over the objections of director Henry Hathaway, who wanted to use a nightclub habitu¿ named Harry the Hipster.

Mr. Widmark's memorable staircase encounter with the old lady was the first scene filmed. Despite its effectiveness, Hathaway made life hard on the set for the inexperienced film actor, either not talking to him at all or embarrassing him in front of others. One day, after the director insulted him, Mr. Widmark quit and walked off the set.