(6 February 1931 - 9 July 2019)
The American actor Rip Torn, who has died at the age of 88, was a master at playing unpleasant characters, heavies for whom no-one could feel affection. Born Elmore Rual Torn Jr in Texas of German, Austrian, Bohemian and Moravian descent, he assumed the name Rip which was a family monicker for the male side of his family. At the University of Texas he studied animal husbandry with the intent of buying a ranch. To fund this he moved to Hollywood but needed to work on other jobs before being discovered for the movies. His debut was in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll in 1956. Then he moved to New York to study at the Actors’ Studio under Susan Strasberg and also dance with Martha Graham. After some television work, Kazan cast him in the film A Face in the Crowd, and then he did Time Limit directed by Karl Malden. He had a reasonable part in Lewis Milestone’s war film Pork Chop Hill with Gregory Peck and then it was mostly TV until he played Judas in Nicholas Ray’s biblical epic King of Kings.
Torn worked on and off Broadway many times. Kazan directed him in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page, and the same cast appeared in Richard Brooks’ film of the play. Torn played a theatre director in Critics’ Choice with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball and then appeared in The Cincinatti Kid, Norman Jewison’s 1965 poker-playing drama with Steve McQueen. After a slew of popular TV series, Torn then had a run of films including Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, Cornel Wilde’s Beach Red, Brian G. Hutton’s The Heroin Gang, Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart, Joseph Strick’s Tropic of Cancer and Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, the last involving a real and famously controversial fight between director and star.
Torn was memorable as a Country & Western singer in Payday and also in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie. He kept busy in movies and on television right up to 2016. Notable among his films were The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, First Family, Airplane II: The Sequel, Cross Creek, Songwriter with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, City Heat with Clint Eastwood, Extreme Prejudice with Nick Nolte, Beautiful Dreamers (as Walt Whitman), RoboCop 3, How To Make an American Quilt, Men In Black I, II and III, Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas, and Marie Antoinette (as Louis XV). In later years Rip Torn was popular in the TV series The Larry Sanders Show, Will & Grace and 30 Rock. His only Academy Award nomination was for Cross Creek, but he won a Primetime Emmy for The Larry Sanders Show. Rip Torn was married three times, to the actresses Ann Wedgeworth, Geraldine Page and Amy Wright. He was father to six children.
MICHAEL DARVELL
