Jack Warden: Jack Warden, the gravel-voiced character actor and two-time Oscar nominee, appeared in almost 100 feature films and won an Emmy award for his portrayal of crusty football coach George Halas in the 1971 movie Brian's Song.
Warden first made his mark in the movies in 1957 as the sports-obsessed juror in 12 Angry Men and received two Academy Award nominations for his work in two Warren Beatty vehicles, Shampoo (1975) and Heaven Can Wait (1978).
His small-screen CV was just as deep, with featured roles in a dozen series and appearances in about 100 shows and made-for-TV movies.
From the moment Warden broke through on Broadway in 1955 in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge, he said he never stopped working.
"I still panic sometimes when it comes down to 20 minutes between jobs," Warden told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1984. "I love what I'm doing."
The gruff yet often engaging characters he became known for playing could have been lifted from his rough-and-tumble early life.
By 17, the red-headed teen from Newark, New Jersey, was a ranked professional middleweight boxer who billed himself as Johnny Costello - the last name was his mother's - and reportedly once fought on the same card as another future actor, Charles Durning, in Madison Square Garden.
Warden often said he got kicked out of high school for boxing professionally, so he joined the navy.
He came home in 1941, shovelled coal on tugboats in the East River and a year later joined the merchant marine.
His romance with the sea ended, he said, while he worked in the engine room of a freighter that repeatedly was attacked by German bombs.
After the vessel made it to port, he demanded a job above deck. When the merchant marine wouldn't comply, Warden said he went across the street and joined the army's 101st Airborne Division.
During a practice parachute jump while preparing for the Normandy invasion, his chute failed to fully open. His broken leg required a steel plate and a lengthy hospital stay that had an unexpected side benefit.
A friend suggested he read plays, and among the first Warden tackled was Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. He identified with the play's striking cab drivers and the way the story was told.
"That year in the hospital was the turning point in my life," Warden told the Herald Examiner. "After eight months of that diet, I thought I was an actor and headed straight for New York."
It was 1945, and a series of jobs - bouncer at a dime-a-dance hall, shirt salesman, dockworker, roofer and semi-pro football player - would come first.
While working as a lifeguard in 1946 at a hotel pool in New York, Warden met Margo Jones, manager of the well-regarded Alley Theatre in Dallas. She asked him to join the company and he spent five years there.
Warden debuted on television in 1950 in a production of Ann Rutledge on NBC and began appearing regularly in drama anthologies that often aired live.
With a bit of bluster, he captured a Broadway role in 1955 that became the springboard of his career.
Weeks went by as playwright Miller, who had cast approval for A View From a Bridge, kept calling back Warden and others for readings. Finally, Warden improvised a scene as Marco, the Italian immigrant.
"That's it! That's exactly what I want!" Miller exclaimed.
The actor also would play a handful of roles in other Broadway productions, beginning with Odets' Golden Boy in 1952 and including the Tony-nominated The Man in the Glass Booth in 1969.
Warden worked mainly, and steadily, in television and film up to the 1990s, often playing the heavy in movies before inhabiting more comedic roles.
He was the outlaw in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973), the cab-driving father in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), the hard-nosed city editor in All the President's Men (1976) and Paul Newman's friend and conscience in The Verdict (1982).
When he played the judge in And Justice for All (1979), Warden asked the make-up artist to sharpen the angle of his eyebrows so he would appear more deranged.
Warden was a complex man, several friends have said, who used his lightning-quick humour to entertain - and keep the world at a distance.
He kept a Greenwich Village apartment as a permanent residence, partly for friends to stay in, and the late actor Rod Steiger once pronounced him "one of the few human beings I know who still understands what friendship and honour mean".
Jack Warden Lebzelter was born September 18th, 1920, to John Warden, an engineer, and Laura Costello. His father left the family when Warden was eight and, after a brief return, died while his son was in the navy.
In 1958, Warden married Vanda Dupré, a 27-year-old French actress. "I'm teaching her how to water-ski and fish. She's teaching me French and cooking. It's a great basis for a marriage," Warden joked in 1959. Within a few years, the couple had a son, Christopher.
By the mid-1970s, Warden and his wife had separated but never divorced.
Warden is survived by his companion Marucha Hinds, his son Christopher and two grandchildren.
Jack Warden: born September 18th, 1920; died July 19th, 2006