Texas-born actor was an outsized character on and off the screen
Rip Torn, the Texasborn actor who made his reputation in the works of Tennessee Williams and played roles as diverse as Walt Whitman, Richard Nixon and Judas Iscariot before earning his greatest fame as a gruff, bullying producer on one of the most acclaimed television comedies of the 1990s — but who remained dogged by his reputation as an out-of-control troublemaker — died Tuesday at his home in Lakeville, Conn. He was 88.
The death was announced by his publicist.
On “The Larry Sanders Show,” which starred Garry Shandling as the neurotic star of a late-night talk show and ran from 1992 to 1998 on HBO, Torn played Artie, the showwithin-a-show’s tough-asnails producer, and stole every scene he entered.
Torn’s outsize performance brought him six Emmy Award nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series. He won the award in 1996.
Almost 30 years earlier he had received Obie Awards for his off-Broadway work, as an actor in Norman Mailer’s “The Deer Park” (1967) and as the director of Michael McClure’s “The Beard” (1968). But despite the critical accolades he consistently received in the following decades, other awards were elusive.
His last performance on Broadway, as a self-deluding Texan in Horton Foote’s drama “The Young Man From Atlanta” (1997), was warmly received.
Torn maintained his bad-boy image to the end. He was arrested on drunken-driving charges several times in his 70s. In 2010, he was arrested after breaking into a Connecticut bank at night with a loaded gun in his possession. Explaining that he had been intoxicated and thought the bank was his house, he pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment, criminal trespass, criminal mischief and illegally carrying a firearm. He was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation for three years.
Elmore Rual Torn Jr. was born Feb. 6, 1931, in Temple. He was the son of Elmore Torn, an economist, and the former Thelma Spacek (actress Sissy Spacek was a cousin). He inherited the nickname Rip from his father.
The younger Rip attended Texas A&M, where he studied agriculture, but transferred to the University of Texas, where he switched his focus to drama. After graduating, he served in the Army for two years before moving to New York to study at the Actors Studio.
His first two Broadway appearances were in Williams plays directed by Kazan. In 1956 he took over the lead male role, Brick, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ” toward the end of its run. Three years later he was in the original cast of “Sweet Bird of Youth.”Torn’s nine other Broadway appearances included three acclaimed revivals: Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” (1975) and Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” (1963) and “Anna Christie” (1993). He also appeared frequently offBroadway in the 1960s and ’70s.
His movies ranged from the gritty drama “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965) to the biblical blockbuster “King of Kings” (1961), in which he played Judas, to escapist fare like “The Beastmaster” (1982) and “RoboCop 3” (1993). Shandling said it was Torn’s performance as Albert Brooks’ unconvincingly reassuring afterlife lawyer in the comedy “Defending Your Life” (1991) that won him his role on “The Larry Sanders Show.”
Torn married actress Ann Wedgeworth in 1955. In 1963, two years after he and Wedgeworth divorced, he married Page. They remained married until her death in 1987, but by then Torn had already begun a long-term relationship with actress Amy Wright, who worked with Torn and Page’s Sanctuary Theater Workshop in New York.
In addition to Wright, Torn is survived by four daughters, two sons, a sister and four grandchildren.