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Eli Wallach was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1915. He became a Broadway actor after World War II and won a Tony Award in 1951 in Tennessee Williams play "The Rose Tattoo". But Broadway didn't quite know what to do with this fine actor, and he made many TV appearances until he got his big break in Elia Kazan's Baby Doll in 1956. He followed this up two years later with the starring role in Don Siegel's ultra-gritty film noir The Lineup (one of the last of this genre and an excellent movie), but Hollywood too did not know what to do with him, and he did mostly TV in the 1950s. In 1960 he had perhaps his most memorable role, as Calvera in The Magnificent Seven. It seemed this fine Jewish actor had finally found his niche, playing a Mexican bandit leader! He continued with movies, and in 1966 he starred opposite Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in Sergio Leone's classic Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). The following year he played Mr. Freeze on the Batman TV show, and he settled in as one of the premier character actors, making some 120 appearances since that time. He passed away in 2014 at the age of 98. One of his best films was in Barry Primus' underrated Mistress, from 1992, with Robert Wuhl, Robert De Niro, Danny Aiello, Martin Landau, and many other fine actors and actresses, and I highly recommend it.

Important Added Info: Note that this still has been personally autographed (signed) by Eli Wallach!

Note that this autographed 8x10 is part of a remarkable new collection we have been consigned, and we are auctioning nearly 500 items from this collection in this set of auctions (we will have more from this collection in our next few sets of autograph auctions).
     In the 1970s, our consignor was a high school teacher who taught a film class, and one day a week (and all through the summer) he ran the local movie theater (and he saved all the presskits and one-sheets from the movies the theater showed).
     Starting in the late 1970s, but increasingly greatly in the early 1980s, he hit on the idea of writing to famous celebrities, and enclosing an 8x10 from his collection, and he wrote a literate personalized letter, talking about his work as a film teacher, and discussing his favorite movie by that star.
     He often was able to locate an 8x10 still from his collection that was from a really good movie from that star, or one that had a really good image of that star. In a relatively small number of cases, he did not have a still in his collection to send, so he bought a reproduction from a photo shop, and sent that instead, which is why some of the items that have this notation on them are reproductions.
     He received signed photos back from a good percentage of the people he wrote to, and if the people simply sent him a stock photo back, he did not save it, but if he felt the autograph was genuine, and if they added a personalized note, then he did save them.
     In the late 1980s, he pretty much stopped sending letters and photos, simply because he was just too busy. So this photo (and the vast majority of the other photos we are auctioning for this consignor) were obtained in the mid-1980s, through personal correspondence with this star. This is of course excellent, because back at that time celebrities were not selling their signatures nearly as much, and many of the stars were pretty forgotten and were happy to get letters from people like our consignor!
     He of course does not have any "Certificates of Authenticity", but he only kept ones he felt were surely authentic, and those are the ones we are auctioning. However, bidders can certainly compare the signatures to known examples on the internet to judge for themselves.

As is true of all the signed items we are currently auctioning, we give every buyer 30 days in which to review what they purchased and they can return any item as long as it is within 30 days of the end of the auction. On non-signed items, we give a "lifetime guarantee" on everything we auction, but on signed items, we give the above modified guarantee of 30 days after the auction closes.

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Bruce Hershenson,
306 Washington Avenue, West Plains, MO 65775