JACK Palance was first nominated for an Oscar in 1953, for his role as Joan Crawford's scheming husband in the film noir Sudden Fear. He secured a second nomination the following year as the villain in Shane, regarded by many as the best western. The gaunt, skull-faced actor went on to play hard men in a string of westerns and he set an Oscar record for the longest gap between first nomination and first win when he finally collected the award for best supporting actor for the comedy City Slickers in 1992, in which he had some fun with his screen persona as a wheezy, tough old cowboy.

He was 73 by the time of the ceremony and seemed unsure what to say, so he dropped to the floor and did a series of one-handed push-ups instead, to prove he was in better health than his character Curly Washburn, who dies in the film.

In a curious footnote to his win, Palance became the centre of an enduring Oscar myth the following year when it was widely rumoured that he read out the wrong name, either by accident or design, when presenting the award for best supporting actress.

It was one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history when Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny) beat Vanessa Redgrave (Howards End), and it was suggested that it was too embarrassing for the academy to correct.

Palance was born in 1919 in the Pennsylvania town of Lattimer Mines. His surname was Palahnuik, though there are several variations on the spelling. His given forenames were apparently Walter and Vladimir. In his early films he was Walter Jack Palance, before finally becoming plain Jack Palance.

His father worked in the local coalmines and his parents were immigrants from Ukraine. Palance was fiercely proud of his roots, though he continually had to disabuse people of the notion he was Russian. He refused an award at a Russian film event in Los Angeles in 2004. "I think that Russian film is interesting, but I have nothing to do with Russia or Russian film. My parents were born in Ukraine: I'm Ukrainian. I'm not Russian. So, excuse me, but I don't belong here," he said.

A genuinely tough individual, he worked briefly in the mines and boxed professionally. But he was no slouch intellectually. He went to the University of North Carolina on a sports scholarship and studied journalism at Stanford University on the GI Bill, after serving in the US Air Force during World War II.

He also pursued his interest in acting at Stanford.

After he became a star, it was widely reported his unusual features were the result of plastic surgery following a terrible plane crash: his eyes were narrow, his nose wide and his skin looked as if it had been stretched a little too tightly across his face. But Palance set the record straight in 1984 when he told an interviewer the story was a studio invention.

"If it is a bionic face, why didn't they do a better job of it?" he said. "The only plastic surgery I've had in my life was a 10-minute operation to open my nasal passages because my nose had been broken during my career as a heavyweight boxer."

Palance got his break on Broadway when he took over from Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949, but it is another urban myth that he engineered the opening by sparring with Brando and breaking his nose. The story is true in all but one detail: Brando's opponent was a stagehand, not Palance.

The play's director, Elia Kazan, promptly gave Palance his first film role too, that of a plague-carrying criminal in the memorable thriller Panic in the Streets (1950).

This auspicious debut was followed by a starring role alongside Richard Widmark in the war film Halls of Montezuma (1951). In Sudden Fear he played an actor who is turned down for a part by Crawford, but subsequently courts and marries her.

In the mytho-poetic Shane, Palance helped to refine the image of the taciturn, cold-hearted gunman, hired by a cattle baron to force honest Van Heflin off his land, before meeting his match in Alan Ladd during a classic showdown.

Palance was nervous around horses, hence his slow, deliberate action in mounting, which seemed to add menace to the character.

Although he seemed perfect as tough, often exotic villains, and played Attila the Hun in Sign of the Pagan (1954), Palance showed a more sensitive side as the officer in the war film Attack! (1956) and won an Emmy for his performance as a burned-out boxer in the television drama Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956), which later became a film starring Anthony Quinn.

By the early 1960s, however, Palance seemed to have drifted towards dubious historic adventure films in Europe.

His acting could at times border on hysteria, with a lot of snarling, if not restrained by a strong director.

As the decade progressed, he seemed happy to appear in just about anything, from Jean-Luc Godard's drama Le Mepris (Contempt) in 1963, in which he co-starred with Brigitte Bardot, to a television production of Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966) and the British horror film Torture Garden (1967).

The Professionals (1966), with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin, marked a return to the western and was a huge hit. He became a regular fixture in westerns of the period, including The McMasters (1970) and Chato's Land (1972), but again travelled far and wide for films. He was Fidel Castro to Omar Sharif's Che Guevara in Che! (1969) and they were father and son in John Frankenheimer's neglected Afghan drama The Horsemen (1971). He made a lot of mediocre films in Europe in the '70s and '80s before turning up as a villainous cattle boss in the Billy the Kid film Young Guns (1988). The role of cattle baron was one he knew well: he had his own ranch in California.

Young Guns revived his career. He played the gangster Grissom in Batman (1989) and completed his reversal of fortunes with City Slickers. That was so successful, the studio wanted a sequel. Palance's character had died in the first film, however, so the writers simply came up with an identical twin called Duke for City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994).

In later years he made a record, painted landscapes and published gentle, introspective love poetry that belied the image he had created on screen. He and his first wife, the actor Virginia Baker, had two daughters and a son, all of whom also acted. Palance's son, Cody, predeceased him. His second wife, Elaine Rogers, also survives him.

The Times