Background
Marvin, Lee was born on February 19, 1924 in New York City. Son of Lamont W. and Courtenay Dungeon Master.
Marvin, Lee was born on February 19, 1924 in New York City. Son of Lamont W. and Courtenay Dungeon Master.
He led a sheltered childhood as a member of one of the earliest English families in America. Unhappy at school he joined the marines and fought in the South Pacific, being invalided home in 1944. After various jobs, he became an amateur actor, playing small parts off-Broadway before going to Hollywood in 1950.
His debut was below decks in Hathaway’s You ’re in the Navy Now (51). He became a supporting actor and one of America’s most authentic heavies: favored with close-ups in Duel at Silver Creek (52, Don Siegel); Hangman’s Knot (52, Roy Huggins); Diplomatic Courier (52, Henry Hathaway); Eight Iron Men (52, Edward Dmytryk); Down Among the Sheltering Palms (52, Edmund Colliding); Seminole (53, Build Boetticher); The Stranger Wore a Gun (53, André de Toth); The Wild One (53, Laslo Benedek); Gun Fury (53, Raoul Walsh); and The Raid (54, Hugo Pregónese). Above all, he is remembered as the hoodlum who throws scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat (53, Fritz Lang) and as one of Spencer Tracy’s opponents in Bad Day at Black Rock (54, John Sturges).
At this stage, he was thick-lipped, psychopathic, or degenerate. But he progressed to a quieter, more reflective and cynical hostility—in Fleischer’s Violent Saturday (55); in I Died a Thousand Times (55, Stuart Heisler); as the lecherous heavy in Seven Men from Now (56, Boetticher); and as the scheming officer in Aldrich’s Attack! (56). Already more impressive than many stars, Marvin turned to sour comedy—in Raintree County (57, Dmytryk) and Jerry Hopper’s The Missouri Traveller (58)—before going into TV as a means to stardom.
He was enormously successful in over a hundred episodes of M Squad and returned to films as a credible challenge to John Wayne in The Comancheros (61, Michael Curtiz), John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberiy Valance (62) and Donovan's Reef (63).
Marvin’s owlish punch-pulling in these films led directly to his Oscar in Cat Ballou (65, Elliot Silverstein). Far more important artistically was his methodical, gray-haired, businessman-assassin in Don Siegel’s The Killers (64). By the late 1960s he was at last a major star, walking on automatic through Brooks’s the Professionals (66); The Dirty Dozen (67, Aldrich); and creating one of the most influential violent heroes as the destroyer of the “organization” in John Boorman’s Point Blank (67). After a fascinating picture of a Robinson Crusoe marine in extremis confronting Toshiro Mifune in Boorman’s Hell on the Pacific (68), there were signs of Marvins mellowing. Thus in Paint Your Wagon (69, Joshua Logan) he hammed enjoyably and groaned “I Was Bom Under a Wandering Star.”
Marvin’s career is central to the role of violence in the American cinema. It might be said that he moved from the irrational, unprincipled killer to the outsider figure in Point Blank who is as lethal as the criminal structure of society compels him to be. As a personality, Marvin dropped insensate cruelty for stoical self-defense. At his best, he was without sentimentality, mannerism, or exaggeration, frightening in his very clarity. But he did relax, like a fighter who had grafted his way to the title and then counts on some easier pay-days: Monte Walsh (70, William Fraker); Prime Cut (72, Michael Ritchie); Pocket Money (72, Stuart Rosenberg); The Emperor of the North Pole (73, Aldrich); The Spikes Gang (74, Fleischer); The Klansman (74, Terence Young); Shout at the Devil (76, Beter Hunt); The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (76, Don Taylor); and Avalanche Express (78, Mark Robson).
His acting career then took second place to the court hearings to decide whether Michelle Triola deserved half of his earnings from the years thev had lived together.
In his last years, he was perfectly employed as the sergeant to a young infantry platoon in The Big Red One (80, Samuel Fuller); Death Hunt (81, Hunt); Gorky Park (83, Michael Apted); Dog Day (84, Yves Boisset); The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (85, Andrew V. McLaglen); and The Delta Force (86, Menahem Golan).
When he died, it became suddenly apparent that the movies would not have anyone to follow him in hardness or in that secret wealth of spirit and impassive irony that makes the hardness fascinating. No young actor now could be so fixed without edging into camp. Lee Marvin was the last of the great wintry heroes.
He publicly endorsed John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election.
Served with United States Marine Corps, World World War World War II.
Marvin made the uncommon journey from flagrant, sadistic heavy in supporting parts to a central, necessary, inescapable man of violence— hero? avenger? professional? searcher? The answer was always enigmatic in his best films, and like a sleepwalker Marvin stared into the dream, trying to see an answer. He had such a way of looking—gazing, even—when blank hostility faded into hopeless desire: it's a look that Boorman discovered in Point Blank. Marvin was so strong, he leaves alleged rocks like Wayne or Schwarzenegger looking artificial. But he made so much junk; it took a rare director to explore the significance of so apparently brutal a character.
Quotes from others about the person
“The profound unease we feel in identifying with an evil character in a movie is the recognition that we may be capable of such evil,” wrote John Boorman. thinking about Lee Marvin. “Lee knew from his war experiences the depth of our capacity for cruelty and evil, he had committed such deeds, had plumbed the depths and was prepared to recount what he had seen down there.”
Married Pamela Feeley, October 18, 1970.