The Lawrence Tierney Centennial

Well, how delightful that Lawrence Tierney (1919-2002) was born two days before St. Patrick’s Day! One pictures him starting his annual birthday bender and maintaining it straight through the annual St. Patrick’s bender without breaking a stride and then getting sprung from the annual stopover in the pokey come first of Spring. Tierney must have set some kind of record for actors getting in scrapes with the law both in Hollywood and New York, dozens of times, fistfights, dustups, donnybrooks and brouhahas, not to mention the occasional shooting incident and one leap from a high rise that he was the only witness to (from inside the apartment from whence the jumper leapt). He beat up bartenders, law students, piano players, cops, whoever ticked him off when he was tipsy. I bet Gene Tierney got awful tired of telling people they weren’t related. (He was born 100 years ago today, by the way).

Anyway, Tierney’s penchant for problems nearly derailed the first leg of his career in the ’40s and ’50s, but it didn’t prevent him for earning over 100 screen credits across the decades right up to the end of the 20th century. I chose the photo above because he was way more distinctive looking and memorable during the last stretch. Similar to my experience with Sylvia Sidney, I had seen him in many old movies and many contemporary ones without recognizing him as the same guy. This is how he looked when he was young:

Tierney’s father was a New York cop who worked the aqueduct beat (literally patrolled the city’s water supply). Raised in Brooklyn, Tierney went to Boys’ High School in Bed-Stuy, then had two years at Manhattan College (ironically located in the Bronx), before quitting to work as a day laborer and sometime catalog model. This led to acting classes, the theatre and finally bit parts in movies like Gildersleeve on Broadway (1943) and Val Lewton’s The Ghost Ship (1943). In 1945 he was cast as the lead in Monogram’s Dillinger, and made such a stir he was elevated to stardom at RKO. Gangster pictures and westerns were his bread and butter over the next decade, including the role of Jesse James in Badman’s Territory (1946) and Best of the Bad Men (1951) with Randolph Scott, and the lead in Robert Wise’sBorn to Kill (1947). By The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) he was eighth-billed, and his constant legal woes gradually made him virtually uncastable in films. He got some work in TV and for a while was even forced to resort to jobs outside show business to make ends meet. By the times of Cassavetes’ Gloria (1980) and Dudley Moore’s Arthur (1982) he was a bit player.

But then he began to claw his way back to better supporting parts. He was in John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985), and Stephen King’sSilver Bullet (1985), and had a recurring role on Hill Street Blues (1985-87). He played Ryan O’Neal’s father in Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance(1987). In 1991 he was in a remake of Dillinger (in a different role of course), as well as John Sayles’ City of Hope, and an episode of Seinfeld, in which he played Elaine’s intimidating father. For a gag, he picked up a knife off the kitchen set and put it in his coat, and was going to pull a Psycho-inspired prank, which terrorized the cast, scotching what might have been an excellent recurring role. The following year he got one of the best roles of his career in Quentin Tarantino’sReservoir Dogs, and though he turned in an excellent performance, proved so troublesome that the director never worked with him again. But he worked for almost a decade after that. I am amused to observe that he played Joey Buttafuoco’s father in Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story. He was on Star Trek shows (both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, as well as ER,The Simpsons, etc. His last credit was in the 1999 film Evicted, written, directed and starring his nephew Michael Tierney. Because, ya know, the Irish are all about family.

Speaking of which, Lawrence Tierney’s younger brother Scott Brady (1924-85) had almost as many screen credits as Lawrence did. In his earlier years he was known for starring in minor westerns for the big screen and the small, most notably the TV series Shotgun Slade (1959-61). In later years, he had roles in movies like The China Syndrome (1979) and Gremlins (1984), and played Shirley’s dad on Laverne and Shirley!