Actor Charles Durning dies at 89
Character actor earned Tony Award and Oscar nominations
The Tony Award-winning actor whose work in films and television included roles in the classic comedy “Tootsie” and the TV sitcom “Evening Shade,” died Monday.
Charles Durning was an award-winning Broadway actor in the early 1970s when he became one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood, in films such as “The Sting,” “The Front Page” and “Dog Day Afternoon.”
Durning, a decorated veteran of World War II whose prolific work in films and television included a regular role in the 1990s sitcom “Evening Shade,” died Monday at his home in New York, said Judith Moss, his longtime agent. He was 89.
Durning, a seasoned former member of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival whom Papp once described as a “stocky, tough Irishman,” had a breakthrough role in the hit Papp-produced 1972 Broadway play “That Championship Season” when he was 49.
Durning’s Drama Desk Award-winning performance led to his being cast as the corrupt police lieutenant in “The Sting,” the Oscar-winning 1973 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
Durning went on to appear in movies such as “The Hindenburg,” “The Choirboys,” “The Muppet Movie,” “North Dallas Forty,” “Starting Over,” “True Confessions,” “Sharky’s Machine,” “Tootsie,” “Dick Tracy” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
As a supporting actor, he was nominated for two Oscars: in 1983 as the governor in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and in 1984 as the Nazi colonel in “To Be or Not To Be.”
His TV credits include “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom,” the landmark 1975 made-for-television musical in which he played the mailman who reaches out to Maureen Stapleton’s lonely widow.
As the small-town doctor on “Evening Shade,” the 1990-94 series starring Burt Reynolds, Durning earned two Emmy nominations as a supporting actor.
More recently, Durning appeared in the TV series “Rescue Me.”
Durning’s first love was the stage, which included his Tony Award-winning performance as Big Daddy in the 1990 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
Born Feb. 28, 1923, in Highland Falls, N.Y., Durning was one of 10 children.
In the Army, Durning was in the first wave of soldiers to land on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France, in 1944. He was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge and reportedly was one of the few survivors of the massacre of American POWs at Malmedy, Belgium.
He was awarded three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.
A postwar stint studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York did not bode well for his future as an actor.
“They told me, ‘You’re too short, too fat and have no talent,’ ” Durning said in a 1977 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I was a dreadfully shy person then, and this shook me to the foundations. I thought they knew what they were talking about.”
He worked a variety of jobs, including taxi driver, construction worker, plumber’s helper, elevator operator and night watchman on the New York docks.
In 1960, he made his professional acting debut as a member of the road company of “The Andersonville Trial.”