Lee Marvin

Lee Marvin (February 19, 1924 in New York, United States - August 29, 1987 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American television and film actor. Remembered for the serious tone of his voice (deep bass), his gray hair and his height (1.88m). Winner of the Oscar for Best Actor in 1965 for his double role in the film The Explosive Ingenue .

Biography

Her father was an advertising executive and her mother a fashion editor. The young Marvin was very unruly, so that he was expelled from all the schools in which his parents enrolled him, for being considered incorrigible. His parents finally took him to Florida to do his school studies at a specialized institution, but that didn't work out either.

Marvin then enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, coinciding with the start of World War II. In the Battle of Saipan in June 1944, he was wounded in the lower back, which caused serious damage to the sciatic nerve. As a result, he was declared unfit for service and sent on discharge to the United States. There he began working as a plumber in Woodstock, in the state of New York. On one occasion he was carrying out a repair at the municipal theater, when he was asked to replace an absent actor in a rehearsal. This experience awakened in him an enormous enthusiasm for acting. He moved to New York, and studied and acted in small roles, in minor theaters.

After a while he made his Broadway debut. After this new experience, she dedicated herself to television, a medium in which she was playing numerous secondary roles of little importance. It was then that he decided to move to Hollywood, where he managed to act in increasingly relevant films, embodying serious characters, highly structured with a dark bias but always in the line of tough and charismatic leaders, who, not being protagonists, prevailed in the plots..

Early career credits include: a brief role in the comedy We're Not Married! (with Marilyn Monroe, Ginger Rogers and Zsa Zsa Gabor), The Bribeds (with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame) and The Tree of Life, where Lee Marvin rubbed shoulders with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

In the 1960s he became known as the lead in the TV series Ballinger of Chicago, which ran for 117 episodes and his roles grew in importance. Thus, his performances became more frequent and relevant, which earned him recognition from the public and, already in the 1970s, also from critics.

Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune in the 1968 film: Hell in the Pacific.

In the 1968 film Hell in the Pacific he aptly plays a castaway who harasses another Japanese castaway (Toshiro Mifune) on an island during World War II. In 1969, directed by director Joshua Logan, Marvin starred alongside a young Clint Eastwood in The Legend of the Nameless City, in which he demonstrated a skill in which he had not been seen before: the song. His interpretation of the theme Wandering Star accompanied by Roger Wagner's chorus, is undoubtedly the most outstanding, with his peculiar low-end voice, which Jean Seberg described as &# 34;rain gurgling down a rusty pipe".

Famous are his performances in the films The Dirty Twelve (with John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland...), The Professionals (with Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale) and A Point Blank, which host Marvin's best performances.

In 1965, he received an unexpected Oscar for Best Leading Actor for The Explosive Ingenue, alongside Jane Fonda; a Western musical comedy, in which he plays two characters, a drunken gunslinger and his criminal brother. This award placed him among the most sought after actors in Hollywood. Marvin specialized preferably in action movies. In the last period of his life, he continued to act in films that were very different in terms of their quality and their success at the box office. However, he was already an established movie star.

He was first married in 1951 to Betty Ebeling. The marriage had a son and three daughters. After 16 years, he divorced. In 1970 he married for the second time with Pamela Feeley.

He died suddenly of a heart attack in Tucson, Arizona, at age 63, aggravated by his alcoholism and chronic smoking. On his tombstone in the Arlington County Military Cemetery, Virginia, reads: Lee Marvin. Private First Class of the United States Marine Corps. World War II».

Filmography

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards