Campus film buffs will be getting a rare treat on Monday, Nov. 7 when Eli Wallach gives a talk at Brandeis about his decades-long career as one of Hollywood's greatest character actors. Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents in 1915, Wallach has portrayed a staggering variety of diverse roles, such as Italian mafioso Don Altobello in The Godfather: Part III, the Shah of Khwarezm in Genghis Khan and the Mexican bandit Calvera in The Magnificent Seven. He has performed in some of the greatest films of the last 50 years, from Elia Kazan's Baby Doll in 1956 to Clint Eastwood's Mystic River in 2003.

Wallach is best known, however, for his part in another project with Eastwood: director Sergio Leone's landmark 1966 Spaghetti Western, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Although it was Eastwood's Man With No Name whom the movie launched into iconic status, viewers regularly point to Wallach's amoral but complex con man Tuco (the titular "Ugly") as one of the greatest characters in cinematic history.

The actor recently paid homage to the film in his new autobiography, The Good, The Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage, which will be the focus of his lecture next week. Wallach, along with his wife Anne Jackson (who appeared in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and the made-for-television movie A Woman Called Golda) and their daughter Roberta Wallach (Law & Order), is coming as part of the Office of Communications' Meet the Author series at Brandeis, at the invitation of Prof. Alice Kelikian (HIST) and Alison Harris of the Cambridge Health Alliance, which is cosponsoring the event.

Eli Wallach's talk will begin at 6 p.m. in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater, to be followed by a book signing from 7 to 7:30 p.m. in the same location.