Character actor Ernest Borgnine portrayed villains and good guys, bringing to life on screen what many saw as a boxer-wrestler image. Indeed, Borgnine played a variety of athletes and coaches during his long career.
Ernest Borgnine courtesy Rotten Tomatoes
Born Ermes Effron Borgnine in 1917, Borgnine enjoyed sports during his formative years, and boxing was his favorite. Borgnine famously portrayed many notable sports figures. Here are examples.
–In the film The Square Jungle (1955), Borgnine played Bernie Browne, a friendly and compassionate boxing trainer who helps Tony Curtis’s character rise through the middleweight ranks to a potential championship.
–In Ripped Off (1972), also known as The Boxer, Borgnine plays Captain Perkins, a police investigator tracking a plot involving a boxer, played by Robert Blake, who is forced to throw a fight.
–He played Coach Vince Lombardi in the biographical television movie Legend in Granite (1973). The biopic focuses on Lombardi’s first two seasons as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers (1959 and 1960). Borgnine was lauded for capturing Lombardi’s intensity, mannerisms, and his approach to always winning. Watch a short clip here.
–Borgnine portrayed boxing trainer Angelo Dundee in the biographical film The Greatest (1977), starring Muhammad Ali. The film chronicles Ali’s rise to Olympic gold as a lightweight heavyweight in the 1960 Rome Games, and ends with Ali reclaiming the heavyweight title by knocking out George Foreman in the famous Rumble in the Jungle (1974).
–He starred in the sports comedy film BASEketball (1998), as entrepreneur Ted Denslow, who came up with creating a new league, the National BASEketball League, combining baseball and basketball.
Ernest Borgnine played many other characters that film buffs remember, including From Here to Eternity (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Marty (1955), The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Emperor of the North (1973), The Devil’s Rain (1975), Convoy (1978), All Quiet on the Western Front (1979), and Escape from New York (1981).
Borgnine also found television fame, starring in McHale’s Navy (1962-1966), Airwolf (1984-1986), and voicing “Mermaid Man” on SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-2012).
A life well lived, Ernest Borgnine died in 2012 at the age of 95.
