Robert Ryan

For other people named Robert Ryan, see Robert Ryan (disambiguation).

Robert Ryan
Born	Robert Bushnell Ryan November 11, 1909 Chicago, Illinois, USA
Died	July 11, 1973(1973-07-11) (aged 63) New York City, New York, USA
Years active	1940–73
Spouse	Jessica Cadwalader (1939-72) (her death)

Robert Bushnell Ryan (November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973) was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.

Early life and career

Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Timothy Ryan and his wife Mabel Bushnell Ryan. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, having held the school's heavyweight boxing title all four years of his attendance. After graduation, the 6′ 4" Ryan found employment as a stoker on a ship, a WPA worker, and a ranch hand in Montana.

Ryan attempted to make a career in show business as a playwright, but had to turn to acting to support himself. He studied acting in Hollywood and appeared on stage and in small film parts during the early 1940s.

In January 1944, after securing a contract guarantee from RKO Radio Pictures, Ryan enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton, in San Diego, California. At Camp Pendleton, he befriended writer and future director Richard Brooks, whose novel, The Brick Foxhole, he greatly admired. He also took up painting.

Ryan's breakthrough film role was as an anti-Semitic killer in Crossfire (1947), a film noir based on Brooks's novel. The role won Ryan his sole career Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor. From then on, Ryan's specialty was tough/tender roles, finding particular expression in the films of directors such as Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise and Sam Fuller. In Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1951) he portrayed a burnt-out city cop finding redemption while solving a rural murder. In Wise's The Set-Up (1949), he played an over-the-hill boxer who is brutally punished for refusing to take a dive. Other important films were Anthony Mann's western The Naked Spur, Sam Fuller's uproarious Japanese set gangland thriller House of Bamboo, Bad Day at Black Rock, and the socially conscious heist movie Odds Against Tomorrow. He also appeared in several all-star war films, including The Longest Day (1962) and Battle of the Bulge (1965), and The Dirty Dozen. He also played John the Baptist in MGM's Technicolor epic King of Kings (1961) and was the villainous Claggart in Peter Ustinov's adaptation of Billy Budd (1962).

In his later years, Ryan continued playing significant roles in major films. Most notable of these were The Dirty Dozen, The Professionals (1966) and Sam Peckinpah's highly influential brutal western The Wild Bunch (1969).

Ryan appeared several times on the Broadway stage. His credits there include Clash by Night, Mr. President and The Front Page, the comedy drama about newspapermen. Among his rare stage appearances, Ryan starred opposite Katharine Hepburn at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut where he played Antony to Hepburn's Cleopatra in the summer of 1960.

He appeared in many television series as a guest star, including the role of Franklin Hoppy-Hopp in the 1964 episode "Who Chopped Down the Cherry Tree?" on the NBC medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour. Similarly, he guest starred as Lloyd Osment in the 1964 episode "Better Than a Dead Lion" in the ABC psychiatric series, Breaking Point. In 1964, Ryan appeared with Warren Oates in the episode "No Comment" of CBS's short-lived drama about newspapers, The Reporter, starring Harry Guardino in the title role of journalist Danny Taylor. Ryan appeared five times (1956–1959) on CBS's Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater and twice (1959 and 1961) on the Zane Grey spin-off Frontier Justice. He appeared three times (1962–1964) on the western Wagon Train.

Politics

Ryan was a liberal Democrat who tirelessly supported civil rights issues. Despite his military service, he also came to share the pacifist views of his wife Jessica, who was a Quaker.

In the late 1940s, as the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC) intensified its anti-communist attacks on Hollywood, he joined the short-lived Committee for the First Amendment. Throughout the 1950s, he donated money and services to civic and religious organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee, and United World Federalists. In September 1959, he and Steve Allen became founding co-chairs of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy's Hollywood chapter.

By the mid-1960s, Ryan's political activities included efforts to fight racial discrimination. He served in the cultural division of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and, with Bill Cosby, Robert Culp, Sidney Poitier, and other actors, helped organize the short-lived Artists Help All Blacks.^{[citation needed]}

Ryan's film work often ran counter to the political causes he embraced. He was a pacifist who starred in war movies, westerns, and violent thrillers. He was an opponent of McCarthyism who nevertheless served the anticommunist cause by playing a nefarious Communist agent in I Married a Communist. Even in films like Crossfire and Odds Against Tomorrow, which ultimately promoted racial tolerance, he played bigoted bad guys. Ryan was often vocal about this dichotomy. At a screening of Odds Against Tomorrow, he appeared before black and foreign press representatives to discuss "the problems of an actor like me playing the kind of character that in real life he finds totally despicable."

Personal life

On March 11, 1939, he married Jessica Cadwalader. They had two sons, Cheyney (now a research fellow at Oxford University and a Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Oregon) and Timothy "Tim" Ryan, and one daughter, Lisa Ryan. He lived in Manhattan's famed Dakota Building at 72nd and Central Park West, and eventually sublet his apartment to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Robert and Jessica Ryan remained married until her death from cancer in 1972. He died from lung cancer in New York City the following year at age 63.

Filmography

• Golden Gloves (1940)
• Queen of the Mob (1940)
• Bombardier (1943)
• The Sky's the Limit (1943)
• Tender Comrade (1943)
• Gangway for Tomorrow (1943)
• Marine Raiders (1944)
• The Woman on the Beach (1947)
• Crossfire (1947)
• Berlin Express (1948)
• The Boy with Green Hair (1948)
• Act of Violence (1948)
• Caught (1949)
• I Married a Communist (1949)
• The Set-Up (1949)
• The Secret Fury (1950)
• Born to Be Bad (1950)
• The Racket (1951)
• Flying Leathernecks (1951)
• On Dangerous Ground (1951)
• Clash by Night (1952)
• Beware, My Lovely (1952)
• City Beneath the Sea (1953)
• The Naked Spur (1953)
• Inferno (1953)
• Alaska Seas (1954)
• About Mrs. Leslie (1954)
• Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
• The Tall Men (1955)
• House of Bamboo (1955)
• Escape to Burma (1955)
• The Proud Ones (1956)
• Back from Eternity (1956)
• Men in War (1957)
• God's Little Acre (1958)
• Lonelyhearts (1958)
• Day of the Outlaw (1959)
• Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
• Ice Palace (1960)
• King of Kings (1961)
• The Longest Day (1962)
• Billy Budd (1962)
• Battle of the Bulge (1965)
• The Dirty Game (1965)
• The Professionals (1966)
• The Dirty Dozen (1967)
• Hour of the Gun (1967)
• Custer of the West (1968)
• Anzio (1968)
• A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die (1968)
• Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969)
• The Wild Bunch (1969)
• Lawman (1971)
• La Course du lièvre à travers les champs (1972)
• Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973)
• The Outfit (1973)
• Executive Action (1973)
• The Iceman Cometh (1973) (as Larry Slade)

See also

• Film noir
• Western

External links

• In Praise of Robert Ryan The L Magazine
• Robert Ryan at the Internet Movie Database
• Robert Ryan at the Internet Broadway Database
• Robert Ryan at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Robert Ryan Tribute
• The Robert Ryan Homepage
• The Robert Ryan Centennial
• Robert Ryan at Find a Grave
• Photographs and literature on Robert Ryan