The younger Durning himself would barely survive World War II. His father was unable to work, having lost a leg and been gassed during World War I, so his mother supported the family by washing the uniforms of West Point cadets. He was born into an Irish family of 10 children in 1923, in Highland Falls, New York, a town near West Point. "I'll go downstairs to get the mail, and when I come back I'll say, 'Any calls for me?'"ĭurning's rugged early life provided ample material on which to base his later portrayals. "If I'm not in a part, I drive my wife crazy," he acknowledged during a 1997 interview. He appeared in the short-lived series The Cop and the Kid (1975), Eye to Eye (1985) and First Monday (2002) as well as the four-season Evening Shade in the 1990s. Other films included The Front Page, The Hindenburg, Breakheart Pass, North Dallas Forty, Starting Over, Tough Guys, Home for the Holidays, Spy Hard and O Brother Where Art Thou?.ĭurning also did well in television as a featured performer as well as a guest star. "I never turned down anything and never argued with any producer or director," Durning told the Associated Press in 2008, when he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He played Santa Claus in four different movies made for television and was the pope in the TV film I Would Be Called John: Pope John XXIII. He was the would-be suitor of Dustin Hoffman, posing as a female soap opera star in Tootsie the infamous seller of frog legs in The Muppet Movie and Chief Brandon in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. He quickly made an impression on movie audiences the following year as the crooked cop stalking con men Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning comedy The Sting.ĭozens of notable portrayals followed. He went on to work regularly, if fairly anonymously, through the 1960s until his breakout role as a small town mayor in the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play That Championship Season in 1972. He won a Golden Globe as best supporting TV actor in 1991 for his portrayal of John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald in the TV film The Kennedys of Massachusetts and a Tony in 1990 for his Hot Tin Roof role.ĭurning had begun his career on stage, getting his first big break when theatrical producer Joseph Papp hired him for the New York Shakespeare Festival. View Gallery: Actor Charles Durning dies at 89 He was also nominated for a Golden Globe as the harried police lieutenant in 1975's Dog Day Afternoon. The year after Best Little Whorehouse, Durning received another Oscar nomination, for his portrayal of a bumbling Nazi officer in Mel Brooks' To Be or Not to Be. Indeed, he had met his first wife, Carol, when both worked at a dance studio. Many critics marveled that such a heavyset man could be so nimble in the film's show-stopping song-and-dance number, not realizing Durning had been a dance instructor early in his career. But he may be best remembered by movie audiences for his Oscar-nominated, over-the-top role as a comically corrupt governor in 1982's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. "The actor's actor," as Durning was eulogized by Henry Winkler on Twitter after his death, he portrayed everyone from blustery public officials to comic foils to put-upon everymen. "I was born looking older - and I've been aging since I was a teenager." "I was born a character actor," Durning told USA TODAY in 1990, when he starred as Big Daddy in a Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He was 89.ĭurning's longtime agent and friend Judith Moss told the Associated Press that he died of natural causes at his home in the borough of Manhattan. LOS ANGELES - Charles Durning, the two-time Oscar nominee who was dubbed the king of the character actors for his skill in playing everything from a Nazi colonel to the pope, died Monday in New York City. Watch Video: Actor Charles Durning dies at 89
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