After studying at the legendary Actor's Studio (where he met and became good friends with Marilyn Monroe), Wallach cut his teeth in a string of theatre roles before being cast in his first movie, in Baby Doll for director Elia Kazan. Wallach played smoothie mill owner Silvio Vaccaro, putting on the moves on his rival's virgin bride.

Wallach was made for character acting, rather than the leading man; his next role was brutal killer for hire in The Lineup, Don Siegel's feature length spinoff from the popular cop TV series.

It didn't take long for Wallach to achieve a sort of immortality by playing the villain, again, in The Magnificent Seven. This landmark western, adapted from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, had Wallach as the bandit leader, Calvera, from who the Seven aim to protect the hapless Mexicans.

Wallach followed this up with The Misfits, for John Huston, which turned out to be the last film for both Monroe and Clark Gable. Wallach's supporting role, as Guido, saw him carry a torch for Monroe's Rosalyn. "I'm out of my mind with waitin'..."

Then in 1966 came the role that would remain his signature. Once again a western, but one of the best of all time, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, directed by Sergio Leone as the the third part of his Man With No Name trilogy with Clint Eastwood. Wallach played Tuco, uncharitably christened "the Ugly" in a complex, convoluted epic in which three men are chasing a cache of gold buried in a cemetery. Here Tuco thinks he has got there first, and searches for the grave of one Arch Stanton, where the gold is supposedly concealed.

As the 1960s, and the western era, drew to a close, Wallach kept going, but ended up going further and further afield. He got a rare headline role in Ace High, another spaghetti western, playing a bandit on the run, but more often it was down the bill, in films like Long Live Your Death and The White, the Yellow, and the Black.

The 70s were a little unkind to Wallach; never taken up by the Hollywood new wave, he ended up in schlock like the Michael Winner horror movie The Sentinel, or the Jaws ripoff The Deep. Probably the best of the period was was the 1978 indie Girlfriends, in which Wallach played a rabbi. It vanished at the time, but was recently revived by the Birds Eye film festival.

Things began to perk up a little in the 1980s. He played a bail bondsman in The Hunter, Steve McQueen's final film.

After appearing alongside Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Tough Guys, an 80s version of The Expendables, and with Barbra Streisand in Nuts, Wallach finally got some respect via The Godfather Part III, where he was handed the role of key bad guy Don Altobello.

After small roles in the likes of Two Much, Keeping the Faith (another rabbi), and Mystic River, Wallach got a kind of swansong in the 2006 romcom The Holiday, where he got to make a valedictory speech to Hollywood in the guise of an elderly scriptwriter.

Wallach's final role would be in Wall Street Money Never Sleeps in 2010, playing Cassandra-like broker Jules Steinhart. "It's gonna be the end of the world..." A fitting way to go out.

More on Eli Wallach

• Eli Wallach dies at 98

• Peter Bradshaw's appreciation

• Eli Wallach obituary

• Read an interview from 2010 with Eli Wallach and one from 2000 by Michael Billington

