Oscar winner beloved by generation

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Actor Ernest Borgnine poses at the 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles, Jan. 30, 2011. (AL SEIB / MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE ARCHIVES)

LOS ANGELES -- Ernest Borgnine, the beefy screen star known for blustery, often villainous roles but who won the best actor Oscar for playing against type as a lovesick butcher in Marty in 1955, died Sunday. He was 95.

His longtime spokesman, Harry Flynn, told The Associated Press Borgnine died of renal failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with his wife and children at his side.

Borgnine, who endeared himself to a generation of baby boomers with the 1960s TV comedy McHale's Navy, first attracted notice in the early 1950s in villain roles, notably as the vicious Fatso Judson who beat Frank Sinatra to death in From Here to Eternity.

Then came Marty, a low-budget film based on a Paddy Chayefsky television play that had starred Rod Steiger. Borgnine played a 34-year-old who fears he is so unattractive he will never find romance. Then, at a dance, he meets a girl with the same fear.

"Sooner or later, there comes a point in a man's life when he's gotta face some facts," Marty movingly tells his mother at one point in the film. "And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it. I chased after enough girls in my life. I-I went to enough dances. I got hurt enough. I don't wanna get hurt no more."

The realism of Chayefsky's prose and Delbert Mann's sensitive direction astonished audiences accustomed to happy Hollywood formulas. Borgnine won the Oscar and awards from the Cannes Film Festival, New York Critics and National Board of Review.

Mann and Chayefsky also won Oscars, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hailed the $360,000 Marty as best picture over big-budget contenders The Rose Tattoo, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Picnic and Mister Roberts.

"The Oscar made me a star, and I'm grateful," Borgnine told an interviewer in 1966. "But I feel had I not won the Oscar I wouldn't have gotten into the messes I did in my personal life."

Those messes included four failed marriages, including one in 1964 to singer Ethel Merman that lasted less than six weeks.

But Borgnine's fifth marriage, in 1973 to Norwegian-born Tova Traesnaes, endured and brought with it an interesting business partnership. She manufactured and sold her own beauty products under the name of Tova and used her husband's rejuvenated face in her ads.

During a 2007 interview with The Associated Press, Borgnine expressed delight that their union had reached 34 years. "That's longer than the total of my four other marriages," he commented, laughing heartily.

Although still not a marquee star until after Marty, the roles of heavies started coming regularly after From Here to Eternity. Among the films: Bad Day at Black Rock, Johnny Guitar, Demetrius and the Gladiators and Vera Cruz.

Director Nick Ray advised the actor: "Get out of Hollywood in two years or you'll be typed forever." Then came the Oscar, and Borgnine's career was assured.

He played a sensitive role opposite Bette Davis in another film based on a Chayefsky TV drama, The Catered Affair, a film that was a personal favourite. It concerned a New York taxi driver and his wife who argued over the expense of their daughter's wedding.

But producers also continued casting Borgnine in action films such as Three Bad Men, The Vikings, Torpedo Run, Barabbas, The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch.

Then he successfully made the transition to TV comedy.

From 1962 to 1966, Borgnine -- a navy vet himself -- starred in McHale's Navy as the commander of a Second World War PT boat with a crew of misfits and malcontents. Obviously patterned after Phil Silvers' popular Sgt. Bilko, McHale was a con artist forever tricking his superior, Capt. Binghamton, played by the late Joe Flynn.

The cast took the show to the big screen in 1964 with a McHale's Navy movie.

Borgnine's later films included Ice Station Zebra, The Adventurers, Willard, The Poseidon Adventure, The Greatest (as Muhammad Ali's manager), Convoy, Ravagers, Escape from New York, Moving Target and Mistress.

During the 2007 interview, Borgnine complained he wanted to continue acting but most studio executives kept asking, "Is he still alive?"

"I just want to do more work," he said. "Every time I step in front of a camera I feel young again. I really do. It keeps your mind active and it keeps you going."

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 9, 2012 D2