Oscar winner Karl Malden has died at his home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, three years shy of his 100th birthday. The Streets of San Francisco star was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1912 and raised in Gary, Indiana — ironically, the birthplace of Michael Jackson, who died last week.
A former steelworker and teacher, Malden studied acting at the Goodman Theatre Dramatic School in Chicago and chose to take his talents to New York, where he became involved with the fabled Group Theatre.
He made his stage debut in 1937 and struck up a theatrical partnership with legendary director Elia Kazan, who cast Malden in a host of successful Broadway shows.
But his true big break — deservedly so — came in 1951 for his role as Mitch opposite Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in the big screen production of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. Malden’s role as the suave, mild, watery-eyed Mitch, the good man who, given the right circumstances, could have saved the mentally deranged Blanche Dubois, landed the Hollywood Academy’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Of course, romantic moviegoers were disappointed, for Mitch, in spite of his truly good intentions towards Blanche, never got to attain salvation for the tragic character of Blanche Dubois, played with amazing dexterity by actress Vivien Leigh. But had the film received the kind of Hollywood treatment in which all’s well that ends well, Streetcar... would have lost the disturbing appeal of its dramatic finale.
Brando and Malden were paired again in another milestone in film history: Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront, in which Brando played a dock worker first used by then set against sweeping off the mafia ruling the dock workers’ union and the whole city. In Waterfront, Malden played a priest who convinces the Brando character Terry Malloy to testify against mobster-union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb).
If A Streetcar Named Desire had produced a memorable last line — “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” — uttered by Blanche Dubois, On the Waterfront too produced an unforgettable and too-often quoted line delivered by the Brando character (Terry Malloy, a dock worker). In one of the most famous scenes in movie history, Terry reminds Charley Mallone (Rod Steiger) that, had it not been for the fixing of a boxing fight, “I coulda been a contender.” The line became a catchphrase for anyone or anything that failed to be but would have had it not been for...
In spite of his outstanding achievements on the stage (Golden Boy and the original cast of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, among many other hits) and on film, to the younger generations Malden was synonym with TV’s Lt. Stone in the hit series The Streets of San Francisco, in which he was paired with Michael Douglas (Inspector Steve Keller), the son of Kirk Douglas and at the time an up-and-coming young actor.
The real story behind The Streets of San Francisco is that it did not see the light as a series’ pilot: it was first a made-for-TV movie that made such a big impact on audiences that ABC quickly signed on to carry it as a series. The year was 1972, and the series would  be broadcast for a record five years (1972-1977).
On The Streets of San Francisco, Malden played a widowed veteran cop with more than 20 years of experience who is partnered with a young officer recently graduated from college (Douglas). Although the concept of do-good buddies was not new, the series garnered top ratings among many other 1970s crime dramas. For those whose memories go a long way back, The Streets of San Francisco served as the answer to such shows as Hawaii Five-O, Adam-12, Ironside, Barnaby Jones, Kojak, McMillan and Wife, Police Woman, The Rockford Files, and Switch.
During the second season, production shifted from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which provided the police drama its trademark cityscape and car chases along SanFran’s far from even streets. In the fifth season, after only two episodes, Douglas left the show to act in movies; Douglas had produced the award winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, and intended to carry on with his big screen career. Proving that, above all, The Streets of San Francisco was a character-driven story, when actor Richard Hatch was signed on to play Stone’s new partner (Inspector Dan Robbins), the ratings for Streets... nosedived uncontrollably, and ABC pulled it off the air after five seasons and 119 episodes.
Malden need not imitate Douglas’ move, for he already had a distinguished record on classic stage plays and memorable films.
In fact, it was the big screen which had recognized Malden’s talent much earlier, when he received an Academy Award for his performance alongside Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
 All in all, in a career spanning seven decades, Malden made an indelible mark portraying plain-spoken men of gruff, coarse manner, although he was noted for the understated, natural dignity he gave to many of his roles.
Malden’s talents were so varied that he earned a place in the works of playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, as well as directors Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock and John Frankenheimer. Apart from Brando, he shared the screen with the likes of Vivien Leigh, Montgomery Clift, Rod Steiger and George C. Scott.
But to most audiences he will always be remembered for his prime-time TV fixture The Streets of San Francisco, for which he earned four Emmy nominations, although he never won.
San Francisco and audiences around the world will miss Malden and his Lt. Stone, but the echoes of this fuzz’s steps will forever resound in the ears of TV-reared generations.