Later he was bayoneted by a young German soldier whom he killed with a rock. He killed several Germans and was wounded in the leg. soldiers to land at Normandy during the D-Day invasion and the only member of his army unit to survive. 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, N.Y., 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.
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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.
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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. Career started on stageĭurning had begun his career on stage, getting his first big break when theatrical producer Joseph Papp hired him for the New York Shakespeare Festival. 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 as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 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's To Be or Not to Be. Indeed, he had met his first wife, Carol, when both worked at a dance studio. Many critics marvelled 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.
"They're going to carry me out, if I go," he said.ĭurning's longtime agent and friend, Judith Moss, told the AP that Durning died of natural causes in his home in the borough of Manhattan.Īlthough he portrayed everyone from blustery public officials, to comic foils to put-upon everymen, Durning 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. He told The Associated Press in 2008 that he had no plans to stop working.
He would recall years later that he was hooked as soon as heard the audience laughing. When one of the comedians showed up too drunk to go on, Durning took his place. His hard life and wartime trauma provided the basis for a prolific 50-year career as a consummate Oscar-nominated character actor, playing everyone from a Nazi colonel, to the Pope to Dustin Hoffman's would-be suitor in Tootsie.ĭurning, who died Monday at age 89 in New York, got his start as an usher at a burlesque theatre in Buffalo, N.Y. Charles Durning grew up in poverty, lost five of his nine siblings to disease, barely lived through D-Day and was taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge.
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