Walken's father baked bread for a living. His mother spent most of her time trying to get her kids into showbiz. Eventually, young Ronnie attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan, where he rubbed shoulders with Marvin Hamlisch and Gypsy Rose Lee's son Eric.

After graduating from PCS in 1961, he attended Hofstra University for one year before dropping out to be in the musical "Best Foot Forward," with Liza Minnelli. But when he tried to make the transition to drama from musicals, he almost didn't succeed. Cast as the king of France in "The Lion in Winter," he suffered from horrible stage fright. When the producer threatened to let him go, as in the movies, Walken asked him for one last chance. He mastered his fear and went on to win a Clarence Derwent Award for best newcomer.

Walken did extensive stage work, including plays by Tennessee Williams, Shakespeare and Chekhov. And he is still highly regarded as a stage presence, having recently performed on Broadway as Gabriel Conroy in the musical based on James Joyce's renowned short story "The Dead." But the next transition for Walken was from the stage to the silver screen. It was time. Even though he was flourishing on the boards, he was making a measly $11,000 a year, by some accounts.

He snagged bit parts in movies like "Me and My Brother" (1968), with poet Allen Ginsberg, and "The Anderson Tapes" (1971), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery. There were other pictures, but it was the role of Duane, the brother with the thousand-yard stare and a death wish, in "Annie Hall" that brought him to the attention of many. In the 1997 Playboy interview, Walken suggests that he may have gotten the part of Nick Chevoteravich in "The Deer Hunter" because of his Duane shtick. It doesn't seem that far-fetched. By the end of "The Deer Hunter," Walken's Nick has the same dead-fish look that Duane has when he tells Alvie (Woody Allen) of his secret desire to be in a car crash.

Walken's self-annihilation binge as Nick in "The Deer Hunter" became one of the most memorable vicarious experiences of '70s film. Michael Cimino, the film's director, was at the same time lauded by critics and attacked by those on the political left who viewed the movie as revisionist. It won five Oscars, including Walken's, and spawned copycat instances of deadly Russian roulette games nationwide. Walken was now on the radar screen of all ciniastes for his sensitive performance of a soldier driven mad by his Vietnam War experiences.

"I don't think it had anything to do with being about a particular war," Walken told Playboy of the film. "It had more to do with young men's romantic notions of war, the idea that war's an adventure. They think they're going to go and have a good time, get out of the house. In reality, though, they get their legs blown off."

Cimino's film, and Walken's part as the story's most tragic character, seemed to sum up the nation's pessimistic view of the Vietnam experience. The wound was still raw, and Cimino was rubbing salt in it. Most people have only a vague recollection of the film. But everyone seems to remember the Russian roulette scenes and the scenes of Nick's funeral alternating with news clips of the American evacuation from a doomed Saigon.

Walken followed up "The Deer Hunter" with a string of losers. He was a gunfighter in Cimino's colossal bomb "Heaven's Gate" (1980). Afterward, he played his first lead as a mercenary in "The Dogs of War" (1980). Reviewers were not kind; nor were they enamored with Walken's portrayal of a marvelously greasy dancing pimp in the dark musical "Pennies From Heaven" (1981). But Walken's footwork caught the attention of those unaware of his skills in that department. Starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, "Pennies From Heaven" was the American film version of Dennis Potter's British TV series of the same title. It's a brilliant film that deserves to be rediscovered, in part for Walken's incarnation of a petty underworld tyrant.

In 1981, while he was filming the movie "Brainstorm" with costar Natalie Wood, Walken's life took a bizarre turn reminiscent of one of his characters'. Walken was a guest aboard a yacht belonging to Wood and her husband, Robert Wagner, when Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina Island on the evening of Nov. 28. According to Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, Wood slipped and fell into the water while trying to board the yacht's dinghy. Her cries for help were not heard by Walken or Wagner, and her body was found floating one mile south of the yacht, near an isolated cove.

Though Noguchi eventually ruled out foul play, rumors have persisted to this day. There was speculation that Wagner and Walken had been fighting, and gossip mavens posited that there was a love triangle of Wagner, Walken and Wood. In that famous Playboy interview Walken rejected the proposition that he and Wagner had been fighting. He also put forth his theory that the dinghy had been knocking against the side of the boat and Wood had gone to right it when she slipped, countering the theory that Wood was attempting to escape a heated argument.

After "Brainstorm," Walken carried on in his Prince of Strange mode, playing a man plagued by migraines and an eerie ability to see into the future in David Cronenberg's film version of the Stephen King novel "The Dead Zone" (1983). Walken, Cronenberg and King, three maestros of the macabre wrapped up in one movie! Unfortunately, the film doesn't quite live up to this confluence of dark forces. But Walken is dead-on as psychic Johnny Smith, a role that could have been tailor-made for him, though the plot is hokey at times.

Walken then played Bond nemesis Max Zorin in "A View to a Kill" (1985) and Sean Penn's lumpen father in "At Close Range" (1986), as well as a number of smaller roles. His lead as writer Whitley Strieber in "Communion" (1989) seemed to augur Walken's emergence in the popular imagination as a cult icon. He was perfectly cast as the man whose bestselling book about his alleged abduction by aliens served as the basis for the movie. However, it was in the '90s that Walken would explode as a larger-than-life figure, going well beyond the restricted existence of a character actor to become the Peter Lorre of the pre-millennium.

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