ERNEST BORGNINE:WITH HIS coarsely podgy features, bug eyes, gap-toothed grin and stocky build, Ernest Borgnine, who has died aged 95 of renal failure, seemed destined to remain one of nature's supporting actors in a string of sadistic and menacing parts. Instead he won an Oscar for a role which was the antithesis of all his previous characters.
In 1955, the producer Harold Hecht wanted to transfer Paddy Chayefsky’s teleplay Marty to the big screen, with Rod Steiger in the title role, which he had created. But Steiger was filming Oklahoma! so was unavailable.
Borgnine was offered the role after a female guest at a Hollywood reception quite disinterestedly remarked to Hecht that, ugly as he was, Borgnine possessed an oddly tender quality which made her yearn to mother him.
Marty, a 34-year-old butcher from the Bronx, meets a plain schoolteacher at a Saturday night dance. They are drawn together by their fears of rejection and loneliness. One of the first films to bring new naturalism, talent and life to Hollywood from TV, Marty was known in the trade as a “sleeper”, a film that, without any obvious appeal, becomes a hit. It won four Oscars – best director (Delbert Mann), best film, best screenplay and best actor for Borgnine.
Borgnine also won awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, and was voted man of the year by the butchers of America. This decidedly unalluring actor had enjoyed the good fortune to encounter a role made to measure for his particular talents and physique. Though no finer part ever came his way, he was at least grateful to no longer be automatically cast as a heavy. In fact, it was as a comic character, in the popular TV series McHale’s Navy (1962-66), that he was to make his most enduring impression on the American public.
He was born Ermes Effron Borgnino in Hamden, Connecticut, to Italian parents. His father worked on the railways and his mother was said to be the daughter of a count. Borgnine lived in Milan between the ages of two and seven, later attending high school in New Haven before joining the navy in 1935. Rising through the ranks, he left the service as a chief gunner’s mate. He then enrolled in the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, Connecticut, after which he joined the Barter theatre in Virginia.
In 1952, Borgnine made his first and last Broadway appearance, in the comic fantasy Mrs McThing, starring Helen Hayes. His film debut had come the year before in China Corsair, an adventure starring Jon Hall, in which he played a double-crossing Chinese villain.
As far as truly nasty characters went, Borgnine was particularly memorable in From Here to Eternity (1953) as Sergeant “Fatso” Judson, the beer-bellied bully of the dreaded stockade who makes Frank Sinatra’s life a misery. He was equally hissable in Johnny Guitar (1954), Vera Cruz (1954) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955).
After being cast against type in Marty, he was given far more varied roles. In The Square Jungle (1955), he was the gentle trainer of a boxer (Tony Curtis). In Jubal (1956), a western version of Othello, he was powerful and touching as a cattle-ranch owner who is convinced by the villainous Steiger that his wife has been unfaithful with the hired hand Glenn Ford. In the Catered Affair (also known as Wedding Breakfast, 1956), he was Bette Davis’s hot-headed Bronx cab-driver husband. He played the songwriter Lew Brown in the Best Things in Life Are Free (1956), his only film musical.
In the following years, Borgnine was seldom off the screen. He spent much of the 1960s playing the bumbling Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale in the popular TV series McHale’s Navy, and was also kept busy marrying and divorcing.
He had married Rhoda Kemins in 1949 and, after their divorce, he wed the actor Katy Jurado in 1959. After their divorce, he wed Ethel Merman in 1964 but the marriage lasted little more than a month.
His fourth wife was Donna Rencourt: their marriage lasted for seven years from 1965. During this period, he became an active freemason; he was later honoured with the 33rd degree of the masonic order and its grand cross.
Borgnine proclaimed, “I’m proud of the fact that I belong to an organisation that made me a better American, Christian, husband and neighbour.”
In 1973 he married Tova Traesnaes, who headed her own cosmetics company.
In the 1980s, Borgnine worked with a younger generation of directors including John Carpenter (Escape from New York, 1981), Wes Craven (Deadly Blessing, 1981) and Paul Morrissey (Spike of Bensonhurst, 1988), but appeared most often in conventional action pictures, and in three crass TV movie sequels to the Dirty Dozen.
Throughout the 1990s, he expended most of his energy on the golf course while continuing to appear mostly in supporting roles, though he did take the lead in the Sean Penn-directed segment of the omnibus film 11’09”01 – September 11 (2002) and in the Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez, to be released later this year.
He is survived by Tova and his children, Christofer, Nancee and Sharon.
Ernest Borgnine (Ermes Effron Borgnino):born January 24th,1917; died July 8th, 2012