Martin Landau is alive and well and about to start living again on ABC.

The 74-year-old actor, whose first episodic-TV work in nearly two decades found him playing the dying, Alzheimer's-ridden father of "Without a Trace's" Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia), attracted a certain amount of attention at a recent ABC press event in Pasadena, Calif., just by showing up.

(Yes, we know they're just acting when they die on TV, but Landau had made a particularly convincing dead guy.)

Starting March 22, Landau will co-star in "The Evidence" as Dr. Sol Goldman, a quirky forensic scientist whose flashes of brilliance occasionally save the day for a couple of police officers played by Orlando Jones and Rob Estes.

Like Landau, who boasts of having 7,000 songs on his iPod — put there for him by Jones — Goldman seems to be young for his years.

And that suits Landau just fine.

"I find myself being offered a lot of roles these days where it's an old guy sitting at a table who grunts a great deal," Landau said. "And there's no arc to the character and there's no reason to be there, except to be an old guy."

Taking the "Without a Trace" role, that of an old guy who suffered from Alzheimer's and, ultimately, kidney failure, might have seemed like a risky career move for a working actor who wanted to stay that way, but Landau, who won an Oscar playing Bela Lugosi in "Ed Wood," doesn't seem to mind risks.

"One of my first films was 'North by Northwest,' and I chose to play a homosexual when it wasn't written as a homosexual. So I've always taken chances," he said.

The breadth of Landau's experience isn't lost on his co-stars.

"When you're trying to find that line between are you doing comedy, are you doing drama, what are you doing, Martin, for me, anchors it very often, because he approaches it from such just a pure acting standpoint," Jones said.

"If you say the line one way, he responds one way. If you say it a different way, he responds differently. So for me, it really is sort of following in the footsteps of the tremendous work that he's done and different genres of work that he's done, and trying to understand how to be legitimate and how to affect the audience as a performer in all the different ways that Martin has throughout his career," he said.

"Without a Trace's" LaPaglia, meanwhile, said he misses Landau "like crazy."

"He was the best. Not only is he a great actor, but when you think about it, he's worked with everyone. From Alfred Hitchcock to Elizabeth Taylor to Richard Burton," LaPaglia said during a recent CBS party.

"So in between takes — I'm a film history buff —I would say to him, 'What was Cary Grant like in "North by Northwest?" And he would tell me this great story. He's such an open, great guy. And then when it was time to go back to work, he would snap back into character and away we'd go."