#Charles durning movies list full#
#Charles durning movies list series#
#Charles durning movies list tv#

#Charles durning movies list full#

Les's pursuit of Dorothy is full of funny moments – when he squeezes on to a garden swing with her at his ranch, it creaks under his weight – but it touches on pathos, too, particularly when Les speaks of his wife, and when he makes his move on Dorothy with an excruciating proposal.

#Charles durning movies list tv#

In Tootsie (1982), he was the wealthy widower Les Nichols, who falls hopelessly in love with the TV star Dorothy Michaels, not knowing that behind the drag makeup is the luckless actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), who is infatuated with Les's daughter.

#Charles durning movies list series#

That decade he also took police roles in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and the TV series The Cop and the Kid (1975-76). He re-teamed with De Palma for Sisters (later Blood Sisters, 1973) and The Fury (1978) in the latter, he is the director of a research facility judging psychic ability, and supervises a female patient who unlocks his own troubling secrets. In Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom! (1970), he is the slobbish superintendent who shows off an unsanitary apartment to a prospective tenant (played by Durning's friend Robert De Niro, who recommended him for the part). He cut his teeth in Shakespearean productions staged by Joe Papp and, in 1972, won a Drama Desk award for his performance in That Championship Season on Broadway.īy then, he had played his first film roles. He received the Silver Star and three Purple Hearts.ĭurning was a boxer, ice-cream seller and dance instructor before establishing himself as an actor. In a Memorial Day speech in 2007, he recalled: 'I was the second man off my barge, and the first and third man got killed.' Shot in the hip shortly afterwards, he spent months in hospital, then fought at the Battle of the Bulge.

Charles joined the army aged 17 and took part in the D-day landing aged 21. His father, James, was badly injured in the first world war. His mother, Louise, laundered the clothes of the cadets there. Born in Highland Falls, New York state, he grew up near the military academy at West Point. Making doe eyes at Anne Bancroft, he tells her: 'Consider yourself in the arms of the Gestapo.' It is a broad comic role in a film that balances farce with tragedy.ĭurning knew first-hand the horrors of war. He barks commands at a hapless captain (Christopher Lloyd), then blames him when his plans backfire. Durning has some of the funniest scenes in the film. 'Now they see me, now they don't …'ĭurning's second Oscar nomination was for playing another character uneasy with his authority – the nougat-loving Gestapo chief Colonel Erhardt in To Be Or Not to Be (1983), Mel Brooks's remake of Ernst Lubitsch's classic about a Polish theatre company's attempt to outsmart the Nazis. His evasive nature is captured in a magical song-and-dance routine: 'I love to dance a little sidestep,' he sings.

Durning plays the slippery Texan governor who must decide whether to close down the establishment. His first Oscar nomination came for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), an ebullient musical about the southern hospitality offered at a brothel called the Chicken Ranch. His heavyset frame meant he was often cast as tough guys, but he later assumed more jovial roles, portraying Father Christmas several times. Nevertheless, his jowly face, with its boxer's nose and sly eyes, grew increasingly familiar, and his name in the opening titles usually promised good things ahead. Durning had only a handful of scenes, and over the next 40 years would seldom be granted more screen time in 200-odd film and TV roles. He makes an explosive appearance, tearing down an alley after the slick grifter played by Robert Redford, and repeatedly lurches out of the shadows throughout the rest of the film. The American actor Charles Durning, who has died aged 89, first grabbed audience attention as the crooked Lieutenant Snyder in The Sting (1973).