LOS ANGELES — Martin Landau, Oscar-winning actor for “Ed Wood,” has died at 89.

He died Saturday at UCLA Medical Center where he had “unexpected complications” during a short hospitalization, his publicist confirmed.

The Oscar-winning veteran appeared in classic films such as Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” and Alfred Hitchock’s “North By Northwest” and starred in the “Mission: Impossible” television series in the 1960s. He won an Academy Award for his portrayal of washed-up Bela Lugosi in “Ed Wood.”

Throughout his prolific career, the tall, lean actor remained enthusiastic about his craft, which saw him inhabit roles that included a master spy, space commander, former Hollywood heavyweights, the prophet Abraham and a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor.

Landau’s dedication was apparent during his tenure as co-artistic director for Actors Studio West with Oscar-nominated director Mark Rydell. He recently starred in the CBS police procedural “Without a Trace,” playing a man with Alzheimer’s disease, and HBO’s “Entourage,” playing bumbling film producer Bob Ryan.

Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Landau began his career as a newspaperman at age 17, working for five years at the New York Daily News as a staff cartoonist and illustrator while studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After five years at the News, Landau quit to try his hand at acting.

While living in New York in the 1950s, he fraternized with pal James Dean and competed for roles with the likes of Sydney Pollack and John Cassavetes.

Shifting to theater, Landau auditioned with 2,000 other actors for Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actors Studio in 1955. Only he and a young Steve McQueen were accepted.

Strasberg berated him for an hour in front of famed studio members Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Marilyn Monroe and Patricia Neal regarding acting choices he had made in a recent TV production.

“Retrospectively, it was good for me,” Landau said, because Strasberg taught him that a “certain actor’s arrogance is needed. Play the truth. Actors need to trust themselves. If you trust yourself, you can trust others and leave the director outside.”

He made his film debut in “Pork Chop Hill” (1959), but few can forget his breakout role as Leonard, the villainous henchman stalking Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s classic thriller “North by Northwest” (1959).

“I had tea with Mr. Hitchcock one afternoon and asked him how he could have cast me in that part, because what I was playing in (the play) ‘Middle of the Night’ was so different,” Landau recalled. ” ‘My dear Mahtin,’ ” he said impersonating the legendary filmmaker, “‘you have a circus going on inside you. If you can do that part in the play, you can do this little trinket of mine.’”

But Landau became wildly popular for his role as Rollin Hand, the “Man of a Million Faces” sleuth on the 1960s hit series “Mission: Impossible” with then-wife Barbara Bain. The actor was not meant to be a regular on the show, but became so popular that he went on to receive Emmy nominations for each of the three seasons in which he appeared, and iwon a Golden Globe in 1968.

Landau and Bain had two daughters together — actress and ballerina Juliet Landau and producer Susan Landau — before they divorced in 1993.

While the small screen provided the kind of the indelible success some actors dream about, Landau said “it was a nightmare too.”

“If a show is a hit, it’s the kiss of death as far as doing anything else is concerned,” he said.

In the early “golden years” of television, Landau told the Times in 1992, “no one knew who was in charge yet. There weren’t that many sets and ad agencies didn’t butt in.” As time went by, however, television lost its ability to be original, he said. “It copycats itself so much. The sense of adventure and risk-taking is much less.

“I’d worked for the giants at the beginning — George Stevens, Hitchcock,” Landau said. “And then it all stopped because I was a television actor.”

TV curse aside, Landau went on to play numerous roles in film, including the wheeler-dealer Abe Karatz in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (1988), and the philandering Judah Rosenthal, the doctor who has his mistress murdered and gets away with it, in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989).

Landau finally won the supporting actor Oscar for playing morphine-addicted “Dracula” star Lugosi in 1994’s “Ed Wood.”

“I’ll tell you something interesting: I haven’t been directed by anybody in probably 30 or 35 years, whether it be Francis Ford Coppola or Tim Burton,” Landau said in 2016. “I come in with stuff, and I have ideas. I think if they don’t like what I’m doing, they’ll say something. They don’t say anything. So I hit the mark, say the words and get the hell out of there.”

Landau is survived by daughters Juliet Landau and Susan Landau Finch.