ACTOR MARTIN LANDAU, STAR OF MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, DIES AT 89.

Landau’s career took a bad turn after (or arguably, when he agreed to star in) Space: 1999, reaching a nadir in an anything-for-a-buck role in 1981’s The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. But by the late ‘80s, he reemerged as a seasoned character actor in Tucker, Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to small business and the entrepreneurial spirit. He was alternately sophisticated and chilling as the wealthy married optometrist who coolly has his mistress killed (by co-star Jerry Orbach, a few years before joining the side of Law & Order) in Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of Woody Allen’s most brilliant films, in which the Woodman revealed his Nietzschean nihilism perhaps a bit too clearly, foreshadowing his own fall from grace just a few years later.