Karl Malden: A life on screen

Karl Malden knew A Streetcar Named Desire back to front by the time they came to shoot it, having worked on the original Broadway production with star Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan. Tennessee Williams's fetid melodrama cast Malden as Mitch, the gallumphing would-be suitor of troubled Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar

Malden's performance in Streetcar won him the best supporting actor Oscar at the 1952 Academy Awards. Here he collects his statue from actor Claire Trevor Photograph: Reuters

Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift were the great rivals of the Method school – but Malden had no trouble working with both. In Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 thriller I Confess he played the stoic detective on the trail of a Catholic priest (Clift) suspected of murder. Dismissed at the time as a below-par Hitchcock outing, the film was later embraced by the burgeoning directors of the Nouvelle Vague Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros

The 1954 classic On the Waterfront returned Malden to Brando and director Elia Kazan. His performance as Father Corrigan, the good angel who guides Brando's compromised longshoreman up the path of righteousness, may well be the role he is most identified with. It was also enough to win him a second Oscar nomination Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Just when it appeared that Malden had carved a lucrative niche in soulful, earthy supporting roles, director Elia Kazan contrived a devilish change of pace. The controversial Baby Doll (1956) boasted a brilliant lead performance by the actor as the clammy, cuckolded husband of a child bride. The film faced instant condemnation by the Catholic League of Decency Photograph: AP

Brando's lone film as director – 1960's One-Eyed Jacks – found a seminal role for his old cohort. Malden co-starred as the duplicitous Dad Longworth, a bank robber who has reinvented himself as a sheriff. 'To these people you're a one-eyed jack,' Brando's hero tells him. 'But I've seen the other side of the card' Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount

The actor took a stroll on the sunny side of the street with Pollyanna, a family heart-warmer in which Hayley Mills's winsome orphan spreads a little happiness through small-town America. Malden was in reliable form as the downtrodden Reverend Ford Photograph: Kobal

Based (very loosely) on the life of Robert Stroud, 1962's Birdman of Alcatraz starred Burt Lancaster as a rebellious lifer who tends birds in his prison cell. Malden made the most of a second-billed slot as the brutish, by-the-book warden Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/United Artists

Malden squared off with Steve McQueen in 1965's The Cincinnati Kid. This Depression-era, New Orleans-set poker yarn featured a Ray Charles theme song and came with a troubled history, with director Norman Jewison being drafted in to replace Sam Peckinpah Photograph: SNAP/Rex Features

On the cusp of old age, Malden found a new level of popularity courtesy of his long-running role in TV's The Streets of San Francisco. Cast as widowed cop Mike Stone, Malden played mentor to Michael Douglas's young buck. The actor's last screen appearance would also come on the small screen. In 2000 he played a Catholic priest on The West Wing, using the same Bible he had brandished all those years ago in On the Waterfront Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros