Lawrence Tierney

Lawrence James Tierney (March 15, 1919 – February 26, 2002) was an American film and television actor who is best known for his many screen portrayals of mobsters and tough guys in a career that spanned over 50 years.

His roles mirrored his own frequent brushes with the law.

Lawrence James Tierney was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn on March 15, 1919, the son of Mary Alice (née Crowley; 1895–1960) and Lawrence Hugh Tierney (1891–1964).

His father was an Irish-American policeman with the New York aqueduct police force.

Tierney was a star athlete at Boys' High School, winning awards for track and field and joining Omega Gamma Delta fraternity.

After graduating from high school, he earned an athletic scholarship to Manhattan College but quit after two years to work temporarily as a laborer constructing a section of the 85-mile-long Delaware Aqueduct, which supplies nearly half of New York City's water supply.

He then bounced around the country from job to job, working for a time as a catalogue model for Sears Roebuck & Company.

After an acting coach suggested he try the stage, Tierney joined the Black Friars theatre group, moving on to the American-Irish Theatre.

Tierney's breakthrough role was starring as 1930s bank robber John Dillinger in 1945's Dillinger, made for the King Brothers and Monogram Pictures, which borrowed him from RKO.

Advertised as a tale "written in bullets, blood, and blondes", Dillinger was initially banned from theaters in Chicago and other cities where the gangster had operated.

A low-budget production that cost $60,000 to make, Dillinger nevertheless proved popular, with Tierney being characterized as "memorably menacing".

He was spotted there in 1943 by an RKO talent scout and given a film contract to work in Hollywood, California.

In 1943 and 1944, Tierney was cast in several uncredited roles in RKO releases such as Gildersleeve on Broadway, Government Girl, The Ghost Ship for producer Val Lewton, The Falcon Out West, Seven Days Ashore, and Youth Runs Wild, also for Lewton.

Back at RKO, Tierney resumed his work there in small and supporting roles in Those Endearing Young Charms (1945), Back to Bataan (1945) (with John Wayne in one scene), Mama Loves Papa (1946), and in the Western Badman's Territory (1946) in which he portrays Jesse James.

However, as ticket sales for Dillinger continued to rise and that film's financial success became apparent at RKO, the studio promoted Tierney in 1946 to star status in Step by Step, another film noir, one that portrays an ex-Marine being falsely accused of murder.

He next starred as a reformed prison inmate in the 1946 release San Quentin.

The next year he was cast as the lead in two more RKO productions that have since gained cult followings among film noir enthusiasts: The Devil Thumbs a Ride directed by Felix E. Feist and the more notorious Born to Kill directed by Robert Wise.

In Feist's film, Tierney plays a homicidal hitch-hiker, while under Wise's direction he portrays a suave but murderous conman.

Film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times condemned Born to Kill upon its release in 1947, professing that it was "not only morally disgusting but an offense to a normal intellect."

He decried Tierney "as the bold, bad killer whose ambition is to 'fix it so's I can spit in anybody's eye,'" being "given outrageous license to demonstrate the histrionics of nastiness."

Despite such negative contemporary reviews of the film, more recent critics and film historians have expressed admiration for Tierney's intense performance and identified the production as a quintessential example of film noir, in particular of RKO's approach to the genre.

Yet, in reflecting on his career, Tierney himself maintained he did not like playing such violent roles:"I resented those pictures they put me in. I never thought of myself as that kind of guy. I thought of myself as a nice guy who wouldn't do rotten things. I hated that character so much but I had to do it for the picture."

Following Born to Kill, Tierney was periodically cast in more sympathetic roles.

In RKO's 1948 release Bodyguard, based on a story co-written by Robert Altman and George W. George, he plays a man wrongly accused of murder.

That year RKO also announced its intentions to star him in The Clay Pigeon, but Bill Williams was instead assigned the leading role.

In 1950, Tierney was cast by Eagle-Lion Films to star in Kill or Be Killed, directed by Max Nosseck, who had also directed Dillinger.

For the remainder of the 1950s, Tierney continued to work in supporting roles in The Man Behind the Badge, The Steel Cage (1954), and Singing in the Dark (1956).

During the 1950s and 1960s, Tierney also had guest roles in many television series, including Naked City, The Detectives, New York Confidential, Man with a Camera, Adventures in Paradise, Peter Gunn, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Follow the Sun, Bus Stop, The Lloyd Bridges Show, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

That same year, however, Tierney only received second billing in Joseph Pevney's Shakedown, although in 1951 he returned to a starring role in another film produced by Eagle Lion and directed by Nosseck: The Hoodlum.

He then returned to RKO to play a supporting role, performing again as Jesse James in Best of the Badmen (1951).

After co-starring in The Bushwhackers (1952), director Cecil B. DeMille cast him as the villain who causes a train wreck in the 1952 Best Picture Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth.

Tierney's supporting work in that film earned him a request by the director of Paramount Pictures to put him under contract, but that proposal was dropped by the studio when the actor was arrested for fighting in a bar.

He did share top billing with Kathleen Crowley, John Carradine, and Jayne Mansfield in the low-budget film noir Female Jungle (1956), but as offers of further screen work steadily declined, he returned to the stage, playing Duke Mantee in a touring version of The Petrified Forest alongside Franchot Tone and Betsy von Furstenberg.

Among his film roles were parts in John Cassavetes' A Child Is Waiting (1963), Naked Evil (1966), Custer of the West (1967), and Killer Without a Face (1968).

After Child is Waiting he moved to France.

After several years of living in France, Tierney returned to New York City, but his troubles with the law continued.

In New York City, he worked as a bartender and construction worker, and drove a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park.

According to the book The Films of John Avildsen: Rocky, The Karate Kid and Other Underdogs, Tierney was supposed to play the role of Joe Curran in Avildsen's 1970 hit Joe.

However, he was fired due to an incident two days before principal photography began when he was arrested for assaulting a bartender who refused to serve him any more hard liquor.

In 2005, film critic David Kehr of The New York Times described "the hulking Tierney" as "not so much an actor as a frightening force of nature".