Maxwell Anderson’s play Truckline Café had little to recommend it when it opened on Broadway in February 1946. A drama about a disparate group of characters in a California diner, it was slammed by critics and closed after just 13 performances. Even its co-producer Elia Kazan thought it poor. “The central roles were limp, in both the writing and the performance,” he wrote in his autobiography, though he noted “two small parts were brilliantly played by two unknown actors.” The following year when he directed a new play by Tennessee Williams called A Streetcar Named Desire, Kazan got back in touch with them, casting Marlon Brando as the inarticulate, animalistic Stanley Kowalski and Karl Malden as Blanche DuBois’s shy and awkward suitor Mitch.

The three of them worked together again on the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire and on the 1954 film On the Waterfront, and in the process they revolutionised screen acting, making it much more intimate and punctuating it with the pauses and stutters of ordinary life.

Malden won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for Streetcar and was nominated a second time for Waterfront. With dark, heavy features and big, bulbous nose, Malden lacked the looks and smouldering sexuality of his more iconic peer and was far removed from the established image of a movie star. He looked more like the man in street, but he had the good fortune to come along at a time when theatre and cinema began to connect more directly with reality, as lived by ordinary people, and Malden developed a career as one of America’s most distinguished character actors.

Among the classics there are some pretty mediocre films too, such as Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the Ken Russell film that torpedoed the Harry Palmer series, and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), but Malden eventually landed a major starring role when he played the straighttalking detective Mike Stone in the popular television crime series The Streets of San Francisco in the 1970s. Retaining his character’s familiar hat and overcoat, Malden became the spokesman for the American Express credit card and popularised the catchphrase “Don’t leave home without it”. He also served a distinguished term as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Born Mladen George Sekulovich in Chicago in 1913, Malden moved to the steel town of Gary, Indiana, when he was 5. His family settled in a part of town which, he noted in his autobiography, “may was as well have been Yugoslavia”. His father was fiercely proud of his Serbian roots, his mother was Czech and Malden knew hardly any English until he started school. He acted in school, but he also showed promise as a basketball player and was lined up for a sports scholarship. When it fell through he spent three years in the mills before saving up enough for a single semester at drama school in Chicago, where he met his future wife, fellow student Mona Greenberg.

Malden made his Broadway debut in the Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy in 1937. A highly distinguished cast included Kazan, Lee J. Cobb and Frances Farmer. Around this time Malden anglicised his forename and turned it into his surname. Other Broadway plays followed, including Key Largo (1939-40), a claustrophobic Maxwell Anderson thriller that was later filmed with Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson.

War service in the US Army Air Force hardly interrupted his career and he appeared in both the 1943 stage version and the 1944 film of the patriotic drama Winged Victory, the only difference being that he was billed as Private Malden in the former and Corporal Malden in the latter. His career really took off 1947 when Kazan cast him in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and then A Streetcar Named Desire, and he and Kazan were founder members of the Actors’ Studio, the famous New York drama workshop where Brando also honed his craft.

By the time Malden reprised the role of Mitch on screen, he had already appeared in several films, including the western The Gunfighter (1950) and the war film Halls of Montezuma (1951), and the focus of his career shifted from stage to screen.

Malden, Brando and Kazan worked together again a few years later in On the Waterfront, the powerful drama about union corruption. Brando played a former boxer, Terry Malloy, whose brother works for the unions and Malden was the idealistic priest who encourages him to provide the testimony needed to smash the racketeers and end the intimidation. It was a very personal project for Kazan and the writer Budd Schulberg, two left-wingers who had “named names” during the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts.

Malden often played sympathetic authority figures, though sometimes their actions were constrained or even dictated by social convention, religious belief or, in the case of the inflexible Captain Wessels in John Ford’s starry, apologist epic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), by military orders and discipline.

But Malden could also play sleazy and sometimes downright sinister parts. Kazan gave him the starring role as Archie Lee Meighan, the lecherous, middle-aged cotton baron with a teenage virgin bride in the controversial Baby Doll (1956), a Southern Gothic melodrama written by Tennessee Williams, but not regarded as one of his best works.

He co-starred with Brando in the strange, offbeat western One-Eyed Jacks (1961), the only film Brando ever directed. They played a couple of bandits, Dad (Malden) and Rio (Brando), who rob a Mexican bank together. But Dad deserts his buddy, and while Rio goes to prison, Dad becomes a sheriff. When Rio shows up again, Dad whips him with relish and crushes his gun-hand with a rifle butt.

Malden had never been entirely happy at being forced to change his name and when he became a star he would encourage directors to feature the name Sekulovich somewhere in the film in honour of his father and his ethnic roots. Sometimes a subsidiary character would be renamed at his request. But his father was not pleased when Malden had the name included on a list of previous occupants on the wall of a prison cell in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). “My father got really angry when he saw the movie,” Malden said. “He called me up and said, ‘A Sekulovich has never been in jail’.”

Other films include Ruby Gentry (1952), Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953), Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), How the West Was Won (1962), Gypsy (1962), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Nevada Smith (1966), Hotel (1967) and Patton: Lust for Glory (1970). He directed the military drama Time Light (1957).

In The Streets of San Francisco Malden was a veteran detective, who finds himself paired with Michael Douglas’s college-educated rookie. It ran in the US from 1972 to 1977 and on ITV from 1973 onwards, though it was the TV movie Fatal Vision (1984) that brought him an Emmy to go with his Oscar. American Express continued to ensure a high profile and comfortable lifestyle for Malden during the 1980s. He represented the face of the company for more than 20 years.

In 1989 he took over as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after the notorious ceremony in which Rob Lowe danced with Snow White, and Disney responded with a lawsuit. He successfully took the ceremony back up-market (by Hollywood standards) and out to a world audience via satellite. He was instrumental in reorganising the academy’s archives in a library that is now renowned all over the world. “I’ll go down in history as the man who spent all the academy’s money,” he once quipped. But he will be remembered for much more besides, making a significant mark on American theatre, cinema and television.

He is survived by Mona, his wife of 70 years, and their two daughters.

Karl Malden, actor, was born on March 22, 1912. He died on July 1, 2009, aged 97