Martin Landau (born June 20, 1928) is an American actor. Landau began his career in the 1950s; his early films include a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). He played continuing roles in the television series Mission: Impossible for which he received Emmy Award nominations, and Space:1999. He received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture and his first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and was also Oscar nominated for his role in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). His performance in the supporting role of B la Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994) earned him the Academy Award, Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe. He continues to perform in film and television and heads the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio. Landau was born into a Jewish-American family in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Selma (n e Buchanan) and Morris Landau, an Austrian-born machinist who scrambled to rescue relatives from the Nazis.