R Lee Ermey
Actor who brought terrifying realism to his role as a foul-mouthed drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket
RLEE ERMEY, who has died aged 74, was a Marine turned actor whose performance as the brutal drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) became seared on the memories of cinemagoers and raw recruits alike.
Ermey had initially been hired as a technical adviser to Kubrick on his anti-war satire, which follows a platoon of US Marines through their training and on to the battle-torn streets of Vietnam. Yet he had his eye on the crucial role of Gunnery Sgt Hartman and submitted his own audition tape: a recording of him berating the British actors hoping to play recruits.
Kubrick later recalled that about half of Sgt Hartman’s dialogue in the film itself – “specifically the insult stuff ” – was Ermey’s invention. Relentless, profane and often racially charged, its tone was established in the character’s opening words: “I am Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, your senior drill instructor. From now on you will speak only when spoken to, and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be ‘Sir’. Do you maggots understand that?”
Ermey made a point of not going through lines with the actors – among them Matthew Modine and Vincent D’onofrio – who played the raw recruits, so that the shock on their faces once the cameras rolled could be as authentic as possible. Instead, he practised his delivery in a 50 ft-long rehearsal room, with Kubrick’s assistant Leon Vitali acting as drill sergeant to the drill sergeant, pelting him with oranges and tennis balls until he had delivered 20 perfect “takes” in a row.
Critics singled Ermey out for the authenticity of his performance and he received a Golden Globe nomination. But he was at pains to point out that dramatic convenience had occasionally won out over realism: a drill sergeant would never have hit his recruits across the face, for example, instead limiting himself to a “little slap in the solar plexus”. Minor details aside, the film went down well with many in the Marine Corps. “I got nothing but compliments,” Ermey recalled. He went on to act in more than 70 other feature films, usually in the role of military man or hard-bitten authority figure.
Ronald Lee Ermey was born in Emporia, Kansas, on March 24 1944 and grew up on a farm just outside the city of Edwardsville. His father was a strict disciplinarian and Ermey recalled that he “got a beating every day whether I needed it or not”. The family moved to Washington when he was a teenager and before long he was getting into trouble, joyriding and drinking.
A judge eventually gave him the choice between jail or the military. He attended the Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego, was stationed in Vietnam for 14 months and did two tours in Okinawa, Japan, before retiring due to injury. Moving to Manila in the Philippines, he began studying drama and fell in with an American casting director who got him a job as a technical adviser and helicopter pilot on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
He also took a part as a drill instructor in The Boys in Company C (1978).
His big break came with Full Metal Jacket, when he landed the advisory role by sending Kubrick an eight-page list of all the “inaccuracies” in the original novel. Filming in England had to be put on hold after Ermey broke his ribs in a car accident and Kubrick subsequently decided to reshoot several of his scenes, extending total filming time to 14 months. The actor Dorian Harewood later called the experience “as close to war as I ever want to get”.
Ermey’s subsequent films included Mississippi Burning (1988), Toy Soldiers (1991) and Se7en (1995). He reprised the sergeant role in a more light-hearted vein with the Toy Story films (as the voice of the inch-high plastic Sarge), and in episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy.
A board member of the National Rifle Association and a spokesman for the firearms company Glock, he was also part of a competitive rifle-shooting team that included Donald Trump Jr.
He is survived by his wife Nila and by their four children.
R Lee Ermey, born March 24 1944, died April 15 2018