‘Marty’ made Borgnine a star but his villains made him the fans’ favourite

Film star Ernest Borgnine, who has died at the age of 95, was best known for villainous roles, despite winning best actor Oscar for playing against type as a lovesick butcher in Marty.

Television fans loved Borgnine as the scheming officer in the TV comedy McHale’s Navy. He was also known as the heavy who beats up Frank Sinatra in From Here To Eternity and one of the thugs who menaces Spencer Tracy in Bad Day At Black Rock.

Then came Marty, a low-budget film based on a Paddy Chayefsky television play that starred Rod Steiger. Borgnine played a 34-year-old butcher who fears he is so unattractive he will never find romance. Then, at a dance, he meets a girl with the same fear.

The realism of Chayefsky’s prose and Delbert Mann’s sensitive direction astonished audiences accustomed to happy Hollywood formulas. Borgnine won the Oscar and awards from the Cannes Film Festival, New York Critics and National Board of Review.

Mann and Chayefsky also won Oscars and the $360,000 Marty was hailed as best picture over big-budget contenders The Rose Tattoo, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Picnic and Mister Roberts.

“The Oscar made me a star and I’m grateful,” Borgnine said in 1966. “But I feel had I not won the Oscar I wouldn’t have gotten into the messes I did in my personal life.”

Those “messes” included four failed marriages, including one in 1964 to singer Ethel Merman that lasted less than six weeks. But his fifth marriage in 1973 to Norwegian-born Tova Traesnaes endured and brought with it an interesting business partnership. She manufactured her own beauty products under the name of Tova and used her husband’s rejuvenated face in her ads.

Although still not a marquee star until after Marty, the roles of heavies started coming regularly after From Here to Eternity. The films included Johnny Guitar and Demetrius.

Director Nick Ray advised the actor: “Get out of Hollywood in two years or you’ll be typed forever.” Then came the Oscar, and Borgnine’s career was assured. But producers also continued casting Borgnine in action films such as Three Bad Men, The Vikings, Torpedo Run, Barabbas and The Dirty Dozen.

Then he made the transition to TV comedy. From 1962 to 1966, Borgnine — a navy veteran himself — starred in McHale’s Navy as the commander of a Second World War patrol boat with a crew of misfits and malcontents. The cast took the show to the big screen in 1964 with a McHale’s Navy movie.

Later films included Ice Station Zebra, The Adventurers, and Mistress. He also starred in ’80s TV series Airwolf.

During an interview a few years ago Borgnine complained that he wanted to continue acting but most studio executives kept asking: “Is he still alive?”

“I just want to do more work,” he said.