Article: OBITUARY : Martin Balsam

Although he won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his charming performance as Jason Robards's stuffily correct brother in A Thousand Clowns (1965), the role for which Martin Balsam will always be remembered is the world-weary private detective Arbogast in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho (1960). Few sequences in film history are more terrifying than the one in which Arbogast climbs the staircase of the Bates house, only to be stabbed repeatedly by "Mother Bates". The hapless detective's aghast expression as he tumbles down that staircase lingers in the memory.

One of the most expensive sequences in the film, it involved an elaborate series of cine-matic tricks. The ...

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