Unknown author · Public domain

Alan Arkin won a Tony for his Broadway debut in 1963 and, more than four decades later, an Academy Award for playing a foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine — a career built on being funniest as the most exasperated person in the room, from Catch-22 to Grosse Pointe Blank. He started out performing with Chicago's Second City improv troupe and later directed as often as he acted, taking on the Sobibor death-camp uprising in the 1987 television film Escape from Sobibor.