A giant of Hollywood’s Golden Era, Richard Widmark, has died.

Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.

His death was announced Wednesday morning by his wife, Susan Blanchard. She said that Mr. Widmark had fractured a vertebra in recent months and that his conditioned had worsened.

As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film “Kiss of Death,” Mr. Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death.

“Kiss of Death” - Staircase scene

“The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen,” the critic David Thomson wrote in “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.”

The performance won Mr. Widmark his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor.

Tommy Udo made the 32-year-old Mr. Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and he spent the next seven years playing a variety of flawed heroes and relentlessly anti-social mobsters in 20th Century Fox’s juiciest melodramas.

His mobsters were drenched in evil. Even his heroes, including the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in “Slattery’s Hurricane” (1949) and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” (1953) were nerve-strained and feral.

Richard Widmark and Jean Peters in “Pickup on South Street” (Skip’s Boathouse scene)

“Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be,” Mr. Widmark once said. “They think you’re playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.”

In reality, the screen’s most vicious psychopath was a mild-mannered former teacher who had married his college sweetheart, the actress Jean Hazelwood, and who told a reporter 48 years later that he had never been unfaithful and had never even flirted with women because, he said, “I happen to like my wife a lot.”

He was originally turned down for the role of Tommy Udo by the movie’s director, Henry Hathaway, who told Mr. Widmark that he was too clean-cut and intellectual. It was Darryl Zanuck, the Fox studio head, who, after watching Mr. Widmark’s screen test, insisted that he be given the part. (More.)

Among Richard Widmark’s numerous film classics, “No Way Out” (1950) was especially groundbreaking for the era.

What is often forgotten is that during this tumultuous time, Mankiewicz also released No Way Out (1950), a movie that deals with race and racism in ways never before seen in a Hollywood film. The head of production at Mankiewicz’s studio, Darryl F. Zanuck liked to make movies centered on social problems of the day. He had already produced Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) (anti-Semitism), The Snake Pit (1948) (mental illness), and Pinky (1949) (racial passing). Mankiewicz’s movie was the latest production in this vein.

What distinguishes No Way Out from these and other films in the genre is the complex vision Mankiewicz brings to the screen. Richard Widmark plays Ray Biddle, a racist out to avenge the death of his brother who he believes was murdered by Luther Brooks, the black doctor treating him (Sidney Poitier in his screen debut). Making no concessions to audience sensibilities, Mankiewicz has Biddle let loose with every racial epithet in the book from his first moment on screen. I am not sure that a filmmaker today would even attempt what Mankiewicz dared to do 56 years ago. (More.)

Trailer for “No Way Out” (1950)

Trailer for “Night and the City” (1950)