RIP Ernest Borgnine

Just a year ago, screen legend Ernest Borgnine accepted his Lifetime Achievement award at the 2011 SAG awards, joking about how he got the idea to get into movies from his mother.

The veteran actor died on July 8, 2012 of at age 95 of renal failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with his wife and children at his side. The sad news was confirmed to the Associated Press by his spokesman, Harry Flynn.

The versatile Borgnine sunk his teeth into all types of roles that the 1950s had to offer: the Westerns, the war movies, the biblical epics and attracted notice as the sadistic bully, Sgt. Fatso Judson who finished off Frank Sinatra’s character, Private Maggio, in “From Here to Eternity.”

But it was his role as a shy and sensitive butcher, a “professor of pain,” in “Marty” that attracted the attention of the Academy Awards, Borgnine won a Best Actor Oscar for “Marty” in 1956. His competition that year? James Cagney, James Dean, Frank Sinatra and Spencer Tracy.

He was well-known to television viewers in the 1960s as Lt. Commander Quinton McHale in the “McHale’s Navy” comedy series. In the 70s, he continued in films, such as “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), and even played Angelo Dundee in a biography of Muhammad Ali in 1977 that starred Ali as himself.

In fact, it was a rare year since Borgnine first appeared in China Corsair in 1951 that Ernest Borgnine didn’t work and throughout that time, he co-starred with just about everyone in movie and TV land. Bette Davis, Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Glenn Ford, Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, Joseph Cotten, Maximilian Schell, to name a few. There’s “Square Jungle” where Tony Curtis plays a boxer and Borgnine is his trainer. Boxing champ, Joe Louis, made an appearance.

Married 5 times, Borgnine was the father of four: daughter Nancee from his marriage to Rhoda Kenins; son Cris and daughters Sharon and Diana from his marriage to Donna Rancourt. He is survived by his 4 children and his current wife (since 1972), Tova Traesnaes.