For other persons named Ernest Borgnine, see Ernest Borgnine (disambiguation).
Ernest Borgnine (born Ermes Effron Borgnino in Hamden, Connecticut on January 24, 1917 ) is a Golden Globe, BAFTA and Academy Award winning American actor.
Borgnine is the son of Carlo Borgnino and Anna Boselli, who immigrated to the U.S. from Modena, Italy. His parents divorced when he was two years old and he and his mother went to live in Italy, but five years later they returned to Hamden, Connecticut, where he attended public schools.
Borgnine joined the United States Navy in 1935 after high school. He was discharged in 1941, but he re-enlisted when the United States entered World War II and served until 1945 (a total of ten years), reaching the rank of chief petty officer. Notably, his first cousin was Milton Berle.[citation needed]
After a few years of drifting, Borgnine attended the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, Connecticut. Following graduation, he went to the famous Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. In 1949, he debuted on Broadway in the role of a male nurse in the hit play Harvey.
In 1951, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he received his big break in From Here to Eternity (1953), playing the cruel Sergeant "Fatso" Judson, in charge of the stockade, who taunts fellow soldier Angelo Maggio (played by Frank Sinatra). After Maggio ends up in the stockade for being drunk on duty, Fatso beats him to death. However, Fatso meets his own end in a knife fight with Maggio's best friend, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) as payback for Maggio's death.
He built a reputation of a dependable character actor and appeared in such films as Johnny Guitar (1954) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955).
In 1955, Borgnine starred in the film version of the television play Marty, which gained him an Academy Award for Best Actor. He subsequently appeared in many movies, sometimes in lead roles, but more often as a supporting major star.
Later film roles include The Vikings (1958); The Flight of the Phoenix (1965); The Dirty Dozen (1967); The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Black Hole (1979).
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From 1962 through 1966, he starred in the popular situation comedy television series McHale's Navy, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, in 1963. Borgnine later starred in the 1964 film version of the series.
Borgnine's later television work included a co-starring role (with Jan-Michael Vincent) as veteran helicopter pilot Dominic Santini in the action/espionage series Airwolf. The series ran from 1984 to 1986.
He was the first center square in the original version of the television game show Hollywood Squares, with host Peter Marshall.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Ernest Borgnine has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6324 Hollywood Blvd. In 1996, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Also in 1996, Borgnine toured the U.S. in a bus to meet his fans and see the country. The trip was the subject of a 1997 documentary, Ernest Borgnine on the Bus. He also served one year as the Chairman of the National Salute to Hospitalized Veterans, visiting patients in Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers.
Since 1999, Borgnine has provided his voice talent to the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants as the elderly superhero Mermaid Man (where he is once again paired up with his McHale's Navy co-star, Tim Conway, who voices Mermaid Man's sidekick Barnacle Boy). Borgnine has also appeared on an episode of The Simpsons as himself. He has also recently appeared in television commercials.
Borgnine has married five times.
He holds the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite of Masonry and has long been active in the Craft and is also a member of the Shriners. Borgnine is also a recipient of the Grand Cross, which is the highest honor for service to the Scottish Rite.
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Spencer Tracy was the first actor I've seen who could just look down into the dirt and command a scene. He played a set-up with Robert Ryan that way. He's looking down at the road and then he looks at Ryan at just the precise, right minute. I tell you, Rob could've stood on his head and zipped open his fly and the scene would've still been Mr Tracy's.
The trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting. What you've gotta do is find out what the writer wrote about and put it into your mind. This is acting. Not going out and researching what the writer has already written. This is crazy!
Everything I do has a moral to it. Yes, I've been in films that have had shootings. I made The Wild Bunch (1969), which was the beginning of the splattering of blood and everything else. But there was a moral behind it. The moral was that, by golly, bad guys got it. That was it. Yeah.
Ever since they opened the floodgates with Clark Gable saying, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,' somebody's ears pricked up and said, 'Oh boy, here we go!'. Writers used to make such wonderful pictures without all that swearing, all that cursing. And now it seems that you can't say three words without cursing. And I don't think that's right.
