LOS ANGELES – “Shouldn’t I be?” replied Ernest Borgnine when asked why he’s still working at age 87.
“I think old age is just an expression. As far as I’m concerned, as long as I can keep going and work at my craft, I love it,” Borgnine said. “And, hey, if I can bring a little enjoyment to people, why not?”
David S. Cass Sr., director of Borgnine’s latest movie, said: “Ernie’s from the old school of acting where whatever the part demands he will try … he’s game for anything.”
Including riding a horse.
“I stepped up on the ladder, got on the horse, and off we went,” Borgnine recalled. “Maybe they didn’t know that at one time John Wayne used to get on a horse by ladder.”
Once Borgnine was in the saddle, “he was like a 20-year-old,” Cass said.
In “The Trail to Hope Rose” (airing at 9 tonight on the Hallmark Channel), the latest in a half-century of Western roles, Borgnine plays a rancher who becomes a father figure to an ex-con (Lou Diamond Phillips) determined to stay honest amid the corruption of an 1850s mining town.
Cass said the role of Lawson called for someone “forceful in a very gentle way,” a characterization that utilized both Borgnine’s ” ‘Wild Bunch’ look, … and the happiness in his soul and heart.”
As he did in 1969’s “The Wild Bunch,” Borgnine has played many a bad guy, beginning with his first Western in 1953 – “The Stranger Wore a Gun,” starring Randolph Scott.
His breakout film role was as a heavy, too: Sgt. “Fatso” Judson in 1953’s “From Here to Eternity.”
It was when he was playing a thug opposite Spencer Tracy in “Bad Day at Black Rock” that he auditioned completely against type for the role of the gentle, diffident Bronx butcher in 1955’s “Marty,” winner of four Academy Awards, including best picture.
How he got the role of Marty Piletti is a story he’s told many times, but still tells well.
They had wanted Rod Steiger, who had played Piletti in the 1953 TV version, but Steiger had just gotten a part Borgnine had wanted – the bad guy role of Jud Fry in “Oklahoma!”
So director Delbert Mann and writer Paddy Chayefsky flew to the “Black Rock” location to audition Borgnine.
He walked in wearing “a cowboy suit, cowboy hat, three-day growth of beard, cowboy boots” and even started reading the part with a “Western drawl” before he kicked in with the appropriate Bronx accent.
Borgnine’s test ended up causing tears to flow, and he knew immediately that he had the role.
Later he was “more surprised than anybody else in the whole world” when “Marty” won him the acting Oscar. (Mann and Chayefsky also won Oscars.) The nominees he beat out: Spencer Tracy, Frank Sinatra, James Dean and James Cagney.
“It was a wonderful thing, but you get your 15 minutes of fame and then it’s ‘What else have you done?’” he grinned.
Despite “Marty,” many probably know Borgnine best as Quinton McHale, commander of a motley PT boat crew on ABC’s 1960s smash “McHale’s Navy.”
He’s been in two TV series since – as Dominic Santini, the veteran aircraft owner, in the first three seasons of the action drama “Airwolf,” and as Manny Cordoba, the doorman in the sitcom “The Single Guy.”
He can also be heard as the voice of Mermaid Man in Nickelodeon’s animated “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“I’m always ready if anyone comes along with something good,” he said.
Associated Press
Ernest Borgnine plays the role of Eugene Lawson in the Hallmark Channel’s “The Trail to Hope Rose,” which airs at 9 tonight.
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