The range of his roles almost defies belief.
#Charles durning movie#
He was nominated for an Emmy for playing the middle-aged suitor of Maureen Stapleton in the 1975 TV movie “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.” He received Oscar nominations for his role as an over-the-top singing and dancing governor in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982) and for portraying a Nazi officer in the 1983 Mel Brooks spoof “ To Be or Not to Be.” Durning appeared in such Broadway classics as “Death of a Salesman,” “Inherit the Wind,” “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “The Gin Game.” Besides his Tony-winning role in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” - described by critic Frank Rich in the New York Times as “an indelible hybrid of red-neck cutup and aristocratic tragedian, of grasping capitalist and loving patriarch” - Mr. Durning finally began to get steady work as an actor. Durning played a priest in a touring company of “Fiddler on the Roof” - but his role was cut from the play before it reached Broadway.Īfter the breakthrough of “That Championship Season,” in which he played a small-town mayor, Mr. Durning had 22 Shakespearean roles over a dozen years.īut success still didn’t arrive for years. He said Papp’s belief in him “opened up the gates of heaven for me.” Mr. Durning for the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In the early 1960s, Joseph Papp hired Mr. I still remember: ‘One shovelful of cement to six shovelsful of sand.’ ” “I dug ditches and built foundations and poured and mixed concrete. When he took on a working-class role, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2001, he needed no preparation. From such a life did the character actor develop his character. At 30, he was delivering telegrams, while appearing in plays where his payment came from the passing of a hat. His other jobs included working as a comedian, night watchman, dishwasher, sightseeing guide, bridge painter, bricklayer, plumber’s helper, bartender and cabdriver.
#Charles durning professional#
He became so adept that he became a professional ballroom dancer and teacher. He took speech lessons to overcome a stutter and attended dance class as a form of physical therapy. “They basically said, ‘You have no talent,’ ” he later recalled, “ ‘and you couldn’t even buy a dime’s worth of it if it was for sale.’ ” More than 50 years after he had left the battlefield, he still had nightmares, he said.Īfter the war, determined to pursue acting, he studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York until he was kicked out. Durning appeared several times at Memorial Day observances at the Capitol and Arlington National Cemetery. “There are many horrifying secrets in the depths of our souls that we don’t want anyone to know about.”Īfter keeping silent about his wartime experiences for decades, Mr. “It’s your mind that’s hard to heal,” he told The Washington Post in 1994. Durning to recover from his physical and psychological wounds. He later helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was wounded in battle three times, captured by Nazi troops and killed a soldier in hand-to-hand combat. He had held dozens of menial jobs and, while serving as an Army infantryman, was among the first soldiers to land on the Normandy beaches during the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. Durning had accumulated a lifetime of real-world experience. He got his major break in Jason Miller’s 1972 Broadway play about the aging members of a high school basketball team, “That Championship Season.” A year later, he appeared as a corrupt police officer in the con-man caper movie “The Sting,” with Paul Newman and Robert Redford.īy then, Mr. Durning was virtually unknown until he was almost 50. He was nominated for two Academy Awards and nine Emmy Awards and won a Tony Award for his performance as Big Daddy in a 1990 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”īut the short, thick-bodied Mr. Durning appeared in almost 200 movies, countless television shows and dozens of plays, portraying a range of characters from Shakespearean fools to crooked cops to military veterans haunted by the past.
His agent, Judith Moss, confirmed his death to the Associated Press but did not disclose the cause. Charles Durning, who was often called the ultimate character actor because of his ability to inhabit almost any role, from everyday workingman to politician to priest, and who saw some of the fiercest combat in Europe during World War II, died Monday at his home in New York City.
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