grew up with mchales navy, my dad a ww2 navy vet also. never forget him in poseidon adventure thank you for your service and rest in peace mr borgnine......

Ahh,I always liked good old Ernie. Yeah I lovged McHales Navy. Hadn't from or about him in a long time. So I had forgotten if he was dead or alive as it was. But 95. He hung around for a while,that's for sure. RIP Ernest.

Ernest Borgnine, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 95


George Brich/Associated Press
Ernest Borgnine outside his home in Hollywood, Calif., in 1969.

By ANITA GATES
Published: July 8, 2012

Ernest Borgnine, the rough-hewn actor who seemed destined for tough-guy characters but won an Academy Award for embodying the gentlest of souls, a lonely Bronx butcher, in the 1955 film “Marty,” died Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 95.

His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was announced by Harry Flynn, his longtime spokesman.

Mr. Borgnine made his first memorable impression in films at the age of 37, appearing in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) as Fatso Judson, the sadistic stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s character, Private Maggio, to death. But Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Marty” as a television play, and Delbert Mann, who directed it (Rod Steiger was the star of that version), saw something beyond brutality in Mr. Borgnine and offered him the title role when it was made into a feature film.

The 1950s had emerged as the decade of the common man, with Willy Loman of “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway and the likes of the bus driver Ralph Kramden (“The Honeymooners”) and the factory worker Chester Riley (“The Life of Riley”) on television. Mr. Borgnine’s Marty Pilletti, a 34-year-old blue-collar bachelor who still lives with his mother, fit right in, showing the tender side of the average, unglamorous guy next door.

Marty’s awakening, as he unexpectedly falls in love, was described by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times as “a beautiful blend of the crude and the strangely gentle and sensitive in a monosyllabic man.”

Mr. Borgnine received the Oscar for best actor for “Marty.” For the same performance he also received a Golden Globe and awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Mr. Borgnine won even wider fame as the star of the ABC sitcom “McHale’s Navy” (1962-66), originating the role of an irreverent con man of a PT boat skipper. (The cast also included a young Tim Conway.) He wrote in his autobiography, “Ernie” (Citadel Press, 2008), that he had turned down the role because he refused to do a television series but changed his mind when a boy came to his door selling candy and said, although he knew who James Arness of “Gunsmoke” and Richard Boone of “Have Gun, Will Travel” were, he had never heard of Ernest Borgnine.

Over a career that lasted more than six decades the burly, big-voiced Mr. Borgnine was never able to escape typecasting completely, at least in films. Although he did another Chayefsky screenplay, starring with Bette Davis as a working-class father of the bride in “The Catered Affair” (1956), and even appeared in a musical, “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (1956), playing a Broadway showman, the vast majority of the characters he played were villains.

Military roles continued to beckon. One of his best known was as Lee Marvin’s commanding officer in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), about hardened prisoners on a World War II commando mission. He also starred in three television-movie sequels.

But he worked in virtually every genre. Filmmakers cast him as a gangster, even in satirical movies like “Spike of Bensonhurst” (1988). He was in westerns like “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955) and Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked classic “The Wild Bunch” (1969).

He played gruff police officers, like his character in the disaster blockbuster “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), and bosses from hell, as in the horror movie “Willard” (1971). Twice he played a manager of gladiators, in “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954) and in the 1984 mini-series “The Last Days of Pompeii.”

Mr. Borgnine’s menacing features seemed to disappear when he flashed his trademark gaptoothed smile, and later in life he began to find good-guy roles, like the helpful taxi driver in “Escape From New York” (1981) and the title role in “A Grandpa for Christmas,” a 2007 television movie.

“McHale’s Navy” and the 1964 film inspired by it were his most notable forays into comedy, but in 1999 he began doing the voice of a recurring character, the elderly ex-superhero Mermaid Man, in the animated series “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Unlike many of his fellow actors who began on the stage, Mr. Borgnine professed to have no burning desire to return there. “Once you create a character for the stage, you become like a machine,” he told The Washington Post in 1969. In films, he said, “you’re always creating something new.”

Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on Jan. 24, 1917, in Hamden, Conn., near New Haven. His father was a railroad brakeman. His mother was said to be the daughter of a count, Paolo Boselli, an adviser to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy.

The boy spent several years of his childhood in Italy, where his mother returned during a long separation from her husband. But they returned to Connecticut, and he graduated from high school there.

He joined the Navy at 18 and served for 10 years. During World War II he was a gunner’s mate. After the war he considered factory jobs, but his mother suggested that he try acting. Her reasoning, he reported, was, “You’ve always liked making a damned fool of yourself.”

He studied at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, then moved to Virginia, where he became a member of the Barter Theater in Abingdon and worked his way up from painting scenery to playing the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie.”

In the late 1940s he headed for New York, where by 1952 he was appearing on Broadway as a bodyguard in the comic fantasy “Mrs. McThing,” starring Helen Hayes. He had already made his movie debut playing a Chinese shopkeeper in the 1951 adventure “China Corsair.”

Mr. Borgnine never retired from acting. In the 1980s he starred in another television series, the adventure drama “Airwolf,” playing a helicopter pilot. He took a supporting role as a bubbly doorman in the 1990s sitcom “The Single Guy.”

His other films included “The Vikings” (1958); “Ice Station Zebra” (1968); “Hoover” (2000), in which he played J. Edgar Hoover; and “Gattaca” (1997). His last film appearance was in “The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez,” scheduled to be released this year, in which he played an elderly man who becomes a celebrity to Latino employees at the nursing home where he lives. On television, he was in the series finale of “ER” in 2009; appeared in a cable film, “Love’s Christmas Journey,” in 2011; and continued to do the voice of the washed-up superhero Mermaidman on “SpongeBob SquarePants” until last year.

Mr. Borgnine, who lived in Los Angeles, had five wives. In 1949 he married Rhoda Kemins, whom he had met when they were both in the Navy. They had a daughter but divorced in 1958. On New Year’s Eve 1959 he and the Mexican-born actress Katy Jurado were married; they divorced in 1962.

His third marriage was his most notorious because of its brevity. He and the Broadway musical star Ethel Merman married in late June 1964 but split up in early August. Mr. Borgnine later contended that Ms. Merman left because she was upset that on an international honeymoon trip he was recognized and she wasn’t.

In 1965 he married Donna Rancourt; they had two children before divorcing in 1972. In 1973 he married for the fifth and last time, to Tova Traesnaes, who under the name Tova Borgnine became a cosmetics entrepreneur.

She survives him, as do his children, Christofer, Nancee and Sharon Borgnine; a stepson, David Johnson; six grandchildren; and his sister, Evelyn Verlardi.

Asked about his acting methods in 1973, Mr. Borgnine told The New York Times: “No Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.”

Sometimes he prayed, he said, or just reflected on character-appropriate thoughts. “If none of that works,” he added, “I think to myself of the money I’m making.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/movies/ernest-borgnine-tough-but-tender-actor-...

RIP !!!!!!!

RIP.

Great actor, huge charisma.

Lt. Commander Quinton McHale RIP

Ernest Borgnine



Borgnine in uniform during World War II.
 
Ernest Borgnine's universally acclaimed characters have included the cruel Sergeant Fatso in From Here to Eternity (1953, with Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, and Montgomery Clift); the vicious goon in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, with Spencer Tracy); the lonesome Bronx butcher in search of love in Marty (1955, with Betsy Blair), a performance that won him an Oscar as best actor of the year; and the cunning general in The Dirty Dozen (1967). He had dozens of superb films to his credit as well as television shows, notable as the star of the popular series McHale's Navy (1962-66).

Born Ermes Effron Borgnino in January 1917 in Hamden, Connecticut, the actor was the son of Italian immigrants and the grandson of Count Paolo Boselli, who shared his apparently abundant financial wisdom with King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. Borgnine graduated from New Haven's high school in 1935 and worked a stint selling vegetables off the back of a truck before enlisting. It was while he was pondering his future as a vegetable salesman (at the same time fully aware of how lucky he was to have a job in those lean years) that Borgnine's gaze fell upon a U.S. Navy recruiting poster. Not long thereafter he was in the Navy, an experience that he still credits with making a man out of him. It also provided a fertile atmosphere for the development of his future character in television's McHale's Navy.


The apprentice seaman remained in the Navy for ten years (including one hiatus), from October 1935 to October 1941 and then from January 1942 to September 1945. His first tour was served on board the four-stacker USS Lamberton (DD-119). During the 1930s the Lamberton operated out of San Diego, towing targets for surface combatants, submarines, and aircraft, a role that was to serve her well during World War II. She also participated in experimental minesweeping exercises and was redesignated DMS-1 (minesweeper, destroyer) in November 1940.



In the 1930's Ernest Borgnine served on board the USS Lamberton (DD-119), which towed targets out of San Diego. This photo of the ship's company includes Seaman Borgnine in the fourth row, second from the left.
(Ernest Borgnine collection)

In 1941 Borgnine left the Navy, only to reenlist after Pearl Harbor. From January 1942 until the end of the war he served in the USS Sylph (PY-12), a converted yacht devoted to antisubmarine-warfare activities throughout the war. Operating first out of Tompkinsville (New York) and then New London (Connecticut), the Sylph patrolled for German U-boats during 1942, a devastating year for American merchantmen off the East Coast. In the fall of 1943 she was assigned to Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and a year later to the naval base at Port Everglades, Florida, along with her unit, the surface division of the Atlantic Fleet's Antisubmarine Development Detachment. She was used mainly for training sonarmen and testing and researching new sound and antisubmarine equipment. The Sylph and her unit contributed greatly to the U.S. victory over Germany's vaunted undersea gray wolves.



Borgnine's World War II ship was the USS Sylph (PY-12), which patrolled for U-boat and tested new equipment.
(U.S. Naval Historical Center)

During his naval service Borgnine rose in rank from seaman to gunner's mate first class. Upon his discharge in 1945, he was allowed to wear the American Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal with Fleet Clasp, and the World War II Victory Medal.

He returned to New Haven but could not muster any enthusiasm for the life of factory work that seemed to loom before him. He seriously considered reenlisting in the Navy, but finally, encouraged by his mother, he decided to give show business a whirl. A logical choice, he concluded, as he had always liked to ham it up.

The GI Bill gave Borgnine the means to pursue his education, and he studied for six months at the Randall School of Dramatic Art in Hartford. Next, in the spring of 1946, he was off to the Barber Theater in Abindgon, Virginia, for some real-life experience. He wound up staying there for four years, working at whatever was needed at the moment--driving, scenery-painting, various stagehand chores. At last he persuaded his higher-ups to let him get on the stage during a performance, and there he remained. After appearing in numerous plays throughout the following few months, the budding actor decided it was time to move on to New York.

The city greeted him with its customary indifference, and Borgnine had his share of tough times before getting a part on Broadway in the play Harvey, in the role of a hospital worker. This led to other theater work, including the role of Guildenstern in a production of Hamlet that traveled to Denmark and Germany to entertain U.S. servicemen.

After appearing in several more plays as well as television programs, one of which was Captain Video, Borgnine landed his first work in movies, China Corsair (1951). Now it was time for Hollywood, but by now he had also been typecast as a villain. Several fine roles resulted, including From Here to Eternity (1953), before his performance in Marty (1955) proved definitively that Ernest Borgnine was a versatile actor. After winning the Academy's best-actor award in 1955, his future was secure. His work in All Quiet on the Western Front (1979, costarring Richard Thomas) helped win that movie an Emmy nomination.

Big, friendly, and endowed with a Latin gusto for everyday life, Borgnine was known for his amiability and lack of pretention. The father of three children, he had been married since 1972 to Tova Traesnaes. He was wed four times previously; his renowned 1964 third marriage was to Ethel Merman.

Borgnine continued to make movies and television shows; in 1995-97 he played a doorman in the sitcom The Single Guy. He still corresponded with some of his old Navy pals, and as an honorary flight leader of the Blue Angels, he often took the team to dinner when they flew into Naval Air Station Point Mugu, California. Mr. Borgnine died 8 July 2012 in Los Angeles, at the age of 95.



A friend of the Blue Angels, Borgnine was honored with a plaque from the team in 1957, aboard the Boxer (CVA-21). (U.S. Naval Historical Center)


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Source: Wise, James E., Jr., and Anne Collier Rehill, Stars in Blue: Movie Actors in America's Sea Services (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997): 117-121.
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Acknowledgment: The Navy Department Library gratefully acknowledges the Naval Institute Press for giving permission to post this chapter on the Naval Historical Center website. All rights are reserved by the author and publisher.
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http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/borgnine_e.htm