Marine gained fame playing sergeant in ‘Full Metal Jacket’
LOS ANGELES — R. Lee Ermey, a former Marine who made a career in Hollywood playing hardnosed military men like Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's “Full Metal Jacket,” has died.
Ermey's longtime manager Bill Rogin says he died Sunday morning from pneumonia-related complications. He was 74.
The Kanas native was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his memorable performance in “Full Metal Jacket,” in which he immortalized lines such as: “What is your major malfunction?”
Born Ronald Lee Ermey in 1944, Ermey served 11 years in the Marine Corps and spent 14 months in Vietnam and then in Okinawa, Japan, where he became staff sergeant. His first film credit was as a helicopter pilot in “Apocalypse Now,” which was followed by a part in “The Boys in Company C” as a drill instructor.
The part for which he would become most wellknown, in “Full Metal Jacket,” wasn't even originally his. Ermey had been brought on as a technical consultant for the 1987 film, but he had his eyes on the role of the brutal gunnery sergeant and filmed his own audition tape of him yelling out insults while tennis balls flew at him. An impressed Kubrick gave him the role.
Kubrick told Rolling Stone that 50 percent of Ermey's dialogue in the film was his own.
Ermey raked in more than 60 credits in film and television across his long career in the industry, often playing authority figures in everything from “Se7en” to the “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake.
He voiced the little green army man Sarge in the “Toy Story” films and played in “Prefontaine,” “Toy Soldiers” and “Mississippi Burning.”