He played a devious Southern cotton gin operator desperate to consummate his marriage to a teenage bride (Carroll Baker). Eli Wallach plays his young rival in business and love who ultimately cuckolds Mr. Malden's character.
Along with the plotline, the film's provocative advertising showing Baker sucking her thumb and sleeping in a crib provoked outrage among Catholic groups.
Mladen George Sekulovich, the son of Serbian immigrant laborers, was born March 22, 1912, in Chicago and raised in Gary, Ind. He changed his name in the late 1930s at Mr. Kazan's urging, but Mr. Malden said he felt so guilty that he tried to insert the name Sekulovich wherever possible on film, whether on an office nameplate or shouted out to a fellow TV detective in The Streets of San Francisco.
Mr. Malden excelled in drama and athletics in high school. He twice broke his nose playing basketball, and the injuries left him resigned to never playing a romantic leading man.
He came to New York in 1937 and won a tryout with the Group Theater, then casting Clifford Odets's drama Golden Boy. Through the show, in which he played a boxing manager, Mr. Malden met Mr. Kazan.
He was particularly memorable as the cruel father of baseball player Jim Piersall (played by Anthony Perkins) in Fear Strikes Out (1957); the fire-and-brimstone preacher in Disney's Pollyanna (1960); a sheriff who whips Mr. Brando in One-Eyed Jacks (1961); and an inflexible warden in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) with Burt Lancaster as his prisoner.
In Patton (1970), Malden played Gen. Omar Bradley to George C. Scott's glory-seeking Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
He was nominated four times for an Emmy in The Streets of San Francisco and won for outstanding supporting actor in a limited series or a special for Fatal Vision (1984) as the father-in-law of a murderer. He continued to take occasional film and television parts, among them a priest in an episode of The West Wing.
