Lee Marvin (February 19, 1924 – August 29, 1987)
was an American film actor. Known for his gravelly voice, white
hair and 6' 2" stature, Marvin at first did supporting roles,
mostly villains, soldiers and other
hardboiled characters, but after winning an
Academy Award for Best
Actor for his dual roles in
Cat
Ballou, he landed more heroic and sympathetic leading
roles.
Early life
Marvin was
born in New York
City
, the son of Lamont Waltman Marvin, an advertising
executive and the head of the New York and New England Apple
Institute and his wife Courtenay Washington Davidge, a fashion
writer and beauty consultant. His father was a
direct descendant of Matthew Marvin, Sr., who emigrated from
Great
Bentley
, Essex, England
in 1635 and
helped found Hartford, Connecticut
.
Marvin studied
violin when he was young.
As a
teenager, Marvin "spent weekends and spare time hunting deer, puma,
wild turkey and bobwhite in the wilds of the then-uncharted
Everglades
." He attended St.
Leo Preparatory College in St. Leo, Florida
after being expelled from several schools for bad
behavior.
Marvin left school to join the
United States Marine Corps,
serving as a
Scout
Sniper in the
4th Marine Division. He
was wounded in action during the
WWII
Battle of Saipan, during which most
of his
platoon were killed. Marvin's wound
(in the
buttocks) was from
machine gun fire, which severed his
sciatic nerve. He was awarded the
Purple Heart medal and was given a medical
discharge with the rank of
Private First Class.
Contrary to rumors, Marvin did not serve with
Bob Keeshan during World War II.
Career
After the war, while working as a
plumber's
assistant at a local community theatre in
Upstate New York, Marvin was asked to
replace an actor who had fallen ill during rehearsals.
He then began an
amateur off-Broadway acting career in
New York City and served as an understudy in Broadway
productions.
In 1950,
Marvin moved to Hollywood
. He found work in supporting roles, and from
the beginning was cast in various war films. As a decorated combat
veteran, Marvin was a natural in war dramas, where he frequently
assisted the director and other actors in realistically portraying
infantry movement, arranging costumes, and
even adjusting war surplus military prop firearms. His debut was in
You're in the Navy
Now (1951), and in 1952 he appeared in several films,
including
Don Siegel's
Duel at Silver
Creek,
Hangman's Knot, and the war drama
Eight
Iron Men. He played
Gloria
Grahame's vicious boyfriend in
Fritz
Lang's
The Big Heat
(1953). Marvin had a small but memorable role in
The Wild One (1953) opposite
Marlon Brando (Marvin's gang in the film was
called "The Beetles"), followed by
Seminole (1953) and
Gun Fury (1953). He also had a
small but memorable role as smartalecky sailor Meatball in
The Caine Mutiny.
He was
again praised for his role as Hector the small town hood in
Bad Day at Black
Rock
(1955) with Spencer
Tracy.
During the mid-1950s, Marvin gradually began playing more
substantial roles.
He starred in Attack (1956), and The Missouri
Traveler (1958) but it took over one hundred episodes as
Chicago
cop Frank
Ballinger in the successful 1957-1960 television series
M Squad to actually give him name
recognition. One critic described the show as "a hyped-up,
violent
Dragnet... with a
hard-as-nails Marvin" playing a police lieutenant.
In the 1960s, Marvin was given prominent co-starring roles such as
The Comancheros (1961),
The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance (1962; Marvin played Liberty Valance) and
Donovan's Reef (1963), all
with
John Wayne. Marvin also
guest-starred in
Combat! "The Bridge at Chalons" (Episode
34, Season 2, Mission 1), and
The Twilight Zone
"
The Grave" (1961, episode #72), in which
he played a fearless gunman investigating the haunted grave of a
man who swore to get revenge on him, and "
Steel" (1963, episode #122 ), in
which he played a former boxer who gets into the ring with a boxing
robot.
Thanks to director
Don Siegel, Marvin
appeared in the
groundbreaking
The Killers (1964)
playing an organized, no-nonsense, efficient, businesslike
professional assassin whose character was copied to a great degree
by
Samuel L. Jackson in the 1994
Quentin Tarantino film
Pulp Fiction.
The Killers
was also the first movie in which Marvin received top billing and
the only time
Ronald Reagan played a
villain.
Marvin won the 1965
Academy
Award for Best Actor for his comic role in the offbeat western
Cat Ballou starring
Jane Fonda. Following roles in
The Professionals (1966) and
the hugely successful
The Dirty
Dozen (1967), Marvin was given complete control over his
next film. In
Point
Blank, an influential film with director
John Boorman, he portrayed a hard-nosed
criminal bent on revenge. In that film Marvin, who had selected
Boorman himself for the director's slot, had a central role in the
film's development, plot line, and staging. In 1968, Marvin also
appeared in another Boorman film, the critically acclaimed but
commercially unsuccessful
Hell
in the Pacific, co-starring famed Japanese actor
Toshirō Mifune. He had a hit song with
"
Wand'rin' Star" from the western
musical
Paint Your
Wagon (1969). By this time he was getting paid a million
dollars per film, $200,000 less than
Paul
Newman was making at the time; he was also ambivalent about the
business, even with its financial rewards:
- "You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in
this fucking business, and the next forty years trying to get out.
And then when you're making the bread, who needs it?"
Marvin had a much greater variety of roles in the 1970s and 1980s,
with fewer 'bad-guy' roles than in earlier years. His 1970s films
included
Monte Walsh (1970),
Prime Cut (1972),
Pocket Money (1972),
Emperor of the North Pole
(1973),
The Iceman Cometh
(1973) as Hickey,
The Spikes
Gang (1974),
The
Klansman (1974),
Shout at the Devil (1976),
The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (1976), and
Avalanche Express (1978). Marvin was offered the
role of Quint in
Jaws (1975) but declined, stating "What
would I tell my fishing friends who'd see me come off a hero
against a dummy shark?".
Marvin's last big role was in
Samuel
Fuller's
The Big Red
One (1980). His remaining films were
Death Hunt (1981),
Gorky Park (1983),
Dog Day
(1984),
The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985), with his
final appearance being in
The Delta
Force (1986).
Personal life
A father of six, Marvin was married twice.
His first marriage to
Betty Ebeling began in February 1951 and ended in divorce on
January 5, 1967; during this time his hobbies included sport
fishing off the Baja
California coast and duck
hunting along the Mexican border near Mexicali
. He then married Pamela Feeley (who had been
his girlfriend in Woodstock, New York a quarter century earlier) on
October 18, 1970 and remained her husband until his death.
During
the 1970s, Marvin resided off and on in Woodstock,
New York
, caring for his dying father, and would make
regular trips to Cairns
, Australia to engage in marlin fishing. In 1975 Marvin and
Pamela moved to Tucson
, where he
lived until his death.
Marvin was a
liberal Democrat who opposed the
Vietnam War and declared his support for
the
gay rights movement in a January 1969
interview with
Playboy magazine. He publicly
endorsed
John F. Kennedy in the 1960
presidential election.
In
December 1986, Marvin underwent intestinal surgery after suffering
abdominal pains while at his ranch outside of Tucson
.
Doctors said then that there was an inflammation of the
colon, but that no malignancy was found. He
died of a
heart attack on August 29,
1987 after being hospitalized for more than a
fortnight because of "a run-down condition related
to the flu."
He is interred at Arlington
National Cemetery
where his headstone reads "Lee Marvin, PFC US Marine Corps, World War II".
- Children with Betty Ebeling: Christopher (b.1952), Courtenay
(b.1954), Cynthia (b.1956), Claudia (b.1958)
Community property case
In 1971, Marvin was sued by his live-in girlfriend,
Michelle Triola, who legally changed her
surname to 'Marvin'. Though the couple never married, she sought
financial compensation similar to that available to spouses under
California's
alimony and
community property laws. Triola claimed
Marvin made her pregnant three times and paid for two abortions,
while one pregnancy ended in miscarriage. She claimed the second
abortion left her unable to bear children. The result was the
landmark "
palimony" case,
Marvin
v. Marvin, 18 Cal. 3d 660 (1976). In 1979, Marvin was
ordered to pay $104,000 to Triola for "rehabilitation purposes" but
the court denied her community property claim for one-half of the
$3.6 million which Marvin had earned during their six years of
cohabitation - distinguishing
non-marital relationship contracts from marriage, with community
property rights only attaching to the latter by operation of law.
Rights equivalent to community property only apply in non-marital
relationship contracts when the parties expressly, whether orally
or in writing, contract for such rights to operate between them. In
August 1981, the
California
Court of Appeal found there was no such contract, and thus
nullified the award she had been made. Michelle Triola died of lung
cancer on October 30, 2009.
Partial filmography
Television appearances
Marvin's appearances on television included
M
Squad,
Climax!,
Dragnet (as murder suspect Henry
Ellsworth Ross),
General
Electric Theater,
The
Investigators,
The
Barbara Stanwyck Show,
Route 66,
The
Untouchables,
The Dick
Powell Show,
Combat!,
The Twilight
Zone,
Kraft Suspense
Theatre,and
Dr.
Kildare, as well aswesterns such as
Wagon Train,
Bonanza, and
The Virginian.
See also
References
- Lee Marvin's ancestors from a collection of
celebrity family trees at freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com
- Zec, Donald. Marvin: The Story of Lee Marvin. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1980, ISBN 0-312-51780-7, pp. 20-25
- Zec, Donald. Marvin: The Story of Lee Marvin. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1980, ISBN 0-312-51780-7, p. 217
- Flick, A.J., Marvin in Love, Classic Movies, 1997.
http://www.classicmovies.org/articles/aa112397.htm
- Want to see a marlin? from The Cairns Post
website
- Marvin v. Marvin (1976) 18 C3d 660 from
online.ceb.com
- Unmarried Cohabitant's Right to Support and
Property from peoples-law.org
External links