Oscar Winner Jack Palance Dead at 87 - CNN.com

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Actor Jack Palance, who won an Oscar at 70 with his comedic self-parody in 'City Slickers,' died Friday.

He also played a craggy-faced menace in 'Shane,' 'Sudden Fear' and other films.

Palance died of natural causes at his home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family, said spokesman Dick Guttman. He was 85, according to Associated Press records, but his family gave his age as 87.

When Palance accepted his 1992 Oscar for best supporting actor, he delighted Academy Awards viewers by dropping to the stage and performing one-armed push-ups to demonstrate his physical prowess.

'That's nothing, really,' he said slyly. 'As far as two-handed push-ups, you can do that all night, and it doesn't make a difference whether she's there or not.'

That year's Oscar host, Billy Crystal, turned the moment into a running joke, making increasingly outlandish remarks about Palance's accomplishments throughout the show.

It was a magic moment that epitomized the actor's 40 years in films. Always the iconoclast, Palance had scorned most of his movie roles.

'Most of the stuff I do is garbage,' he once told a reporter, adding that most of the directors he worked with were incompetent, too.

'Most of them shouldn't even be directing traffic,' he said.

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