Ernest Borgnine

Ten years in the Navy

Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on 24 January 1917 in Hamden, Connecticut. He came to acting from the US Navy, not from combat sports: he enlisted at 18 in October 1935 and served on the destroyer USS Lamberton, re-enlisted in January 1942 after Pearl Harbor and spent the Second World War on the patrol yacht USS Sylph, leaving in September 1945 as a gunner's mate first class after about ten years' service.

He then studied at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford and joined the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. His first film roles came in 1951, and his build first typecast him as a heavy.

Fatso Judson and the Black Rock fight

In Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953) he is Staff Sgt. "Fatso" Judson, the sadistic stockade sergeant who torments Frank Sinatra's private, in a film where the Army pressures a former boxer back into the ring for the company team.

Two years later John Sturges gave him his most martial scene. In Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) he is Coley Trimble, a desert-town thug who picks a fight in the diner with a stranger asking questions. The stranger, Spencer Tracy, has only one arm, yet takes him apart with martial arts techniques. The film earned three Oscar nominations.

Marty, the Oscar and after

The same year he changed gear with Delbert Mann's Marty, playing a shy, lonely Bronx butcher, and won the Best Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe. Also in 1955 he was Bernie Browne, the trainer who takes on Tony Curtis's young fighter in Jerry Hopper's The Square Jungle, with former heavyweight champion Joe Louis as himself.

Then came Vera Cruz (1954), The Vikings (1958), The Dirty Dozen (1967) as Maj. Gen. Sam Worden, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) as Dutch Engstrom, and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). On television he starred in McHale's Navy from 1962 to 1966.

In the corner

In 1977 he went back to boxing in Tom Gries's The Greatest, the biopic in which Muhammad Ali plays himself, as Ali's trainer Angelo Dundee. In 1988 he was Baldo Cacetti, the Brooklyn mob boss who fixes a young boxer's fights in Paul Morrissey's Spike of Bensonhurst, earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and Victor in Sergio Martino's Italian boxing film The Opponent.

In January 2011 he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Ernest Borgnine died in Los Angeles on 8 July 2012, aged 95. Never a martial arts star, he was on the receiving or coaching end of some of American cinema's most memorable fights from the 1950s to the 1980s.