Actor, former Marine made career playing military men on big screen
LOS ANGELES — R. Lee Ermey, a former Marine who made a career in Hollywood playing hard-nosed 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 Kansas native was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his memorable performance in “Full Metal Jacket,” in which he immor- talized lines such as: “What is your major malfunction?”
His co-stars atthew Modine and Vincent D’Onofrio tweeted their condothe role of the brutal gunnery lences Sunday evening. sergeant and filmed his own
“#SemperFidelis Always audition tape of him yelling faithful. Always loyal. Do out insults while tennis balls not go gentle into that good flew at him. An impressed night. Rage, rage against the Kubrick gave him the role. dying of the light,” Modine Kubrick told Rolling Stone wrote, quoting the Dylan that 50 percent of Ermey’s Thomas poem. “RIP amigo. dialogue in the film was his PVT. Joker.” own.
Vincent D’Onofrio added: “In the course of hiring the “Ermey was the real deal. The marine recruits, we interknowledge of him passing viewed hundreds of guys. brings back wonderful mem- We lined them all up and did ories of our time together.” an improvisation of the first
Born Ronald Lee Ermey in meeting with the drill instruc1944, Ermey served 11 years in tor. They didn’t know what the Marine Corps and spent 14 he was going to say, and we months in Vietnam and then could see how they reacted. in Okinawa, Japan, where he Lee came up with, I don’t became staff sergeant. His first film credit was as a helicopter pilot in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” which was quickly followed by a part in “The Boys in Company C” as a drill instructor.
He 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 Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake.
The part he would become most well-known for, 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
Mknow, 150 pages of insults,” Kubrick said.
According to Kubrick, Ermey also had a terrible car accident one night in the middle of production and was out for four and half months with broken ribs.
Ermey would also go on to voice the little green army man Sarge in the “Toy Story” films. He also played track and field coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman in “Prefontaine,” General Kramer in “Toy Soldiers” and Mayor Tilman in “Mississippi Burning.”
Ermey also hosted the History Channel series “Mail Call” and “Lock N’ Load with R. Lee Ermey” and was a board member for the National Rifle Association, as well as a spokesman for Glock.
“He will be greatly missed by all of us,” Rogin said. “It is a terrible loss that nobody was prepared for.”
Rogin says that while his characters were often hard and principled, the real Ermey was a family man and a kind and gentle soul who supported the men and women who serve.