Had Richard Widmark stuck to playing villains, he might well have been one of the great Hollywood stars. Instead, as soon as he was big enough to choose his own parts, he chose to play the clean-cut, conscientious hero and, with that shift, some of his charisma was lost. As a hero he could never compete in the same league as Cagney, Bogart or Flynn. He had none of their bravura or sexual appeal. As a good guy he remained a dependable actor, but essentially in the Second Eleven of stars.

As a villain, however, there was none finer than Widmark. No actor was more capable of dropping his vanity before the camera and playing thoroughly unbalanced drifters. As one biographer described him, with only a hint of exaggeration: “With his gangster’s slouch, his machinegun diction and his stiletto grin, the only place he looks really at home is in an electric chair.”

Physically, although he stood at 5ft 11in, he appeared small on screen. He used his slightness in his work. When playing opposite a strong, masculine presence such as Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (1950) he made his character ferret-like and full of grievances against the world. The slightly weak good looks he used to his advantage when playing villains. The eyebrows which were so fair they had to be pencilled in on screen, combined with a soft jaw, made him look like a man who had learnt to fight to be noticed.

His screen debut in 1947 was in a film called Kiss of Death. Victor Mature gave one of his better performances as an ex-convict, but it was Widmark as the dimwitted killer who stole the film. The most chilling scene was when Widmark prepared to thrust an invalid old lady down a flight of stairs, and cackled before he did so. That laugh made Widmark an “overnight” star, and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

He remained an authentic star. He was “old Hollywood”, and in old age reached that level of authority as an icon where he found himself cast as “the General” or “the President” in films. He achieved all that against a domestic background of exemplary normality. Far from drawing on personal experience for his villains, Widmark appeared to have been the lamb in the Hollywood jungle. He was quiet, thoughtful and well-read. He married a girl he met at college and remained happily married. He rarely drank, worked hard and invested his money in property. The excitement of Widmark was all contained on screen in a handful of electrifying performances.

He was born in Sunrise, Minnesota, a small town so obscure that when he tried to retrace it as an adult, he gave up. His parents were both Swedish-born, and he was educated in towns all over the Midwest, following his father, a travelling salesman.

As a young man he went on a bicycle tour of Nazi Germany. He was barred from visiting Dachau, then a camp for political prisoners, but still managed to infiltrate a youth camp where he watched some “ferocious old boy yelling Nazi doctrines at these little kids”. He shot some film, returned to America and began giving illustrated lectures on the topic.

He was shy but he found that he was good at public speaking. That gave him the confidence to turn to acting at Lake Forest College, Illinois, where he had won a scholarship to read law in the early 1930s. Widmark stayed on at the college during the latter 1930s, teaching in the drama department and, though he weighed less than ten stone, playing American football.

In 1938 he tried his luck in New York. Because he was turned down for active service in the war, he spent the next ten years there working on radio soap operas and Broadway shows.

The break came when his agent took him to meet the producer Henry Hathaway, who was looking for a villain to play in an underworld thriller, Kiss of Death. Hathaway took one look at Widmark and politely said: “Sorry, too well-bred, too intellectual.” Out of embarrassment, Widmark picked up the script and began silently to read the part of the moronic killer, Tommy Udo. “Read it aloud,” said Hathaway, “then you’ll see what I mean about the part being unsuitable.” Widmark, who had never played a villain in his life, found a suitably menacing voice and began reading. Hathaway was completely entranced and his skin prickled. Then, during the killing scene, Widmark threw in a macabre chuckle. Hathaway offered him the part on the spot.

Although he would have preferred to stay independent, Widmark was persuaded to sign a seven-year contract for Twentieth Century Fox. With the Oscar nomination, that meant a good deal of typecasting. In his first seven films he killed or was killed in all but one.

As a welcome change, Down to the Sea in Ships (1948) was a whaling drama, which cast Widmark in a sympathetic role opposite Lionel Barrymore, as a young man who reluctantly becomes a father-figure to Barrymore’s grandson. In his next good film, Panic in the Streets (1950), a thriller about an outbreak of bubonic plague in New Orleans, he played a noble medical officer.