Ernest Borgnine

The Villain Hollywood Didn't Expect

Ernest Borgnine had a tough-guy face and a gap between his teeth that was worth millions of dollars. He wasn't the leading-man type the industry was looking for in the 1950s. But his dockworker's physique hid a sensitivity that ended up breaking box office records.

In 1953, he played the sadistic Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity. That beating of Frank Sinatra instantly put him on the map as a tough guy. Casting directors saw him only as a neighborhood thug.

And the gamble paid off.

Before becoming an actor, he served ten years in the United States Navy. That military discipline helped him endure the snubs of a profession that ignored him in his youth. Borgnine didn't start acting until he was past thirty.

A Butcher Against the Giants

No one expected a character actor known for playing violent types to walk away with the top prize. In 1955, he starred in Marty (a small film about a lonely butcher from New York). Paddy Chayefsky's script was a raw portrait of urban loneliness in that era.

Borgnine was paid barely 5,000 dollars for the role. But his performance was so human that it beat James Dean and Spencer Tracy at the Oscars. It was the cheapest film ever to win the Best Picture award up to that point.

He made audiences empathize with an unattractive, lonely man.

But success did not make him settle into tearjerker dramas. He kept accepting supporting roles in big productions such as The Vikings in 1958. He worked for the money and for the craft, without caring much about the glitter of premiere posters.

Dust, Blood and Cartoons

His career was a rollercoaster of genres, from war films to B-movie horror. In 1969, he joined the cast of The Wild Bunch under Sam Peckinpah's direction. That shoot in Mexico was an inferno of heat and real gunpowder.

There he played Dutch Engstrom, the loyal partner in a world that was ending in violence. The film cost six million dollars and changed the way action was shot in mainstream cinema of the 1970s.

But television gave him financial stability that movies sometimes denied him. He starred in the comedy McHale's Navy between 1962 and 1966. That success allowed him to buy a house in Beverly Hills, which he kept until the end of his life.

He was a tireless worker.

Even new generations knew his voice without seeing his face. Since 1999, he has voiced Sireno Man on the cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants. He recorded his lines with the same seriousness as if he were filming with Robert Aldrich.

In 2011, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. His last on-screen appearance was in The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez (released in 2012). He died in July 2012 of kidney failure at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. He was 95 years old.