When Ernest Borgnine won an Oscar for his role in the movie Marty in 1955, he handed Jerry Lewis a bulging sock on his way to the podium. Asked why, he explained, “Jerry Lewis had bet me a buck ninety-eight that I’d win. I’d gone home and taken 198 pennies and put them in a red sock.” Before retrieving his Oscar, Borgnine made sure Lewis got his winnings.
Borgnine was born in Hamden, Conn., and joined the U.S. Navy in 1935, said the Los Angeles Times. Discharged just before Pearl Harbor was attacked, he promptly re-enlisted to serve as a gunner’s mate on a destroyer during World War II. When he returned home, his mother suggested he try acting. After all, she said, “you’re always making a fool of yourself in front of people.”
Borgnine’s breakout role came in 1953’s From Here to Eternity, said The Washington Post, when he played Sgt. “Fatso” Judson, a stockade sergeant who torments Frank Sinatra’s character. Borgnine’s performance was so effective that “people would harass him on the street to see if they could get a rise out of him.” Soon after, he was cast in Marty as a “lonely Bronx butcher,” a role that turned him into “one of the busiest character actors of the next four decades.”
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The gap-toothed, stocky actor mostly played tough guys, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), but he was a “mild-mannered man” in real life. He was “notoriously unsuccessful” in love, marrying five times. His union with Broadway star Ethel Merman barely lasted a month, collapsing during their honeymoon, he said, when fans recognized him but not her. “By the time we got home, it was hell on earth,” he said.
Borgnine “became a household name during the 1960s” as the commander of a naval patrol boat in the television comedy McHale’s Navy, said Reuters. He worked almost to his death in roles such as Mermaid Man on Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants. The key to his long-lasting success, Borgnine said, was his homely looks. “Do I look like a good-looking man? No,” he said in 2011. “But see, I keep working when the rest of the boys are retired.”
