Film
Balsam made his film debut with an uncredited role in On the Waterfront (1954), directed by his Actors Studio colleague Elia Kazan. Balsam played an official of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey investigating mob involvement in the city's waterfront unions. His breakthrough role came a few years later, when he played Juror #1 in 12 Angry Men (1957). He would collaborate with the film's director, Sidney Lumet, twice more with The Anderson Tapes (1971) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
In 1960, he appeared in one of his best-remembered roles as private investigator Arbogast in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, culminating in a scene in which Mrs. Bates surprises him, quickly stabbing him in the chest, at the top of a flight of stairs, which he then falls down, to his death. Along with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, Balsam appeared in both the original Cape Fear (1962) and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Arnold Burns in A Thousand Clowns (1965). Balsam also performed the original voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He told a journalist in August 1966, "I'm not actually seen in the picture at any time, but I sure create a lot of excitement projecting my voice through that machine. And I'm getting an Academy Award winner price for doing it, too." After his lines were recorded, director Stanley Kubrick decided "Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American," and hired Douglas Rain to perform the role for the released film.
Balsam also appeared in such notable films as Time Limit with Richard Widmark, Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, The Carpetbaggers with George Peppard and Alan Ladd, Seven Days in May with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, The Bedford Incident with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, The Man with James Earl Jones, Hombre with Paul Newman and Fredric March, Catch-22 with Alan Arkin and Jon Voight, Tora! Tora! Tora! (as Admiral Husband E. Kimmel), Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, All the President's Men with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, The Delta Force with Lee Marvin, and The Goodbye People. One of his final acting appearances was in the 1994 horror parody The Silence of the Hams, which paid homage to his iconic role in Psycho.
Beyond Hollywood, Balsam was also a popular character actor in Italian films, beginning in 1960 when he starred in the Luigi Comencini film Everybody Go Home. He would star in several poliziottesco films throughout the 1970s, directed by the likes of Fernando Di Leo and Enzo G. Castellari. Balsam's roles in these films would be re-dubbed into Italian, but he would loop his own lines in the English-language export versions. Balsam maintained close ties to Italy even after the end of the poliziottesco trend, traveling there for both professional and personal reasons, and starring in the Italian-produced television series Ocean and La piovra.
