JACK PALANCE was first nominated for an Oscar in 1953 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 ever. 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. The episode provided Oscar host and City Slickers co-star Billy Crystal with the material for a running gag that he kept going all night. At one point he suggested Palance was away bungee-jumping off the Hollywood sign.

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 coal mines 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 and he and his wife, Elaine, walked out. “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 either. 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 the Second World War. At Stanford he also pursued his interest in acting.

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.

“One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery,” he said. “If it is a ‘bionic face,’ why didn’t they do a better job of it? The only plastic surgery I’ve ever had in my life was a ten-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 provided Palance with his first film role as well, that of a plague-carrying criminal in the memorable thriller Panic in the Streets (1950).

It was an auspicious debut, 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 Joan Crawford, but subsequently courts and marries her. His ex-girlfriend reappears on the scene and the film develops into a deadly game of cat and mouse.

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 when he faces off against Alan Ladd in a classic showdown. Palance was nervous of horses, hence his slow, deliberate action in mounting, which seemed to add even more 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 was later a film with Anthony Quinn.

By the early Sixties, however, Palance seemed to have drifted towards dubious historic adventure films in Europe, such as The Mongols (1961) and Sword of the Conqueror (1962). 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 Mépris (Contempt) in 1963, in which he played Brigitte Bardot’s film-producer husband, to a television production of Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966) and the British horror film Torture Garden (1967).

The Professionals (1966) marked a return to the western and was a huge hit. He was the Mexican revolutionary who has supposedly kidnapped a rich American’s wife and is pursued by mercenaries, including Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin.

He was a regular fixture in westerns of the period, including The McMasters (1970) and Chato’s Land (1972). But again he travelled far and wide for films. He was 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 Seventies and Eighties before turning up as a villainous cattle boss in the Billy the Kid film Young Guns (1988). The role of cattle baron was one that he knew well, for he had his own ranch in California.

Young Guns marked a revival in his career. He played the gangster Grissom in Batman (1989) and completed his reversal of fortunes with City Slickers and the Oscar push-ups. The film was so successful that 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).

Other films included Bagdad Café (1987), in which he was a hippy artist, Tango & Cash (1989), Cops and Robbersons (1994), War Games (1996) and Treasure Island (1999), playing Long John Silver. On television he appeared in Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls (1995).

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 actress Virginia Baker, had two daughters and a son, all of whom also acted. His son, Cody, predeceased him. His second wife, Elaine Rogers, also survives him.

Jack Palance, actor, was born on February 18, 1919. He died on November 10, 2006, aged 87.