Robert Bushnell Ryan (November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973) was an American actor and activist. Known for his portrayals of hardened cops and ruthless villains, Ryan performed for over three decades. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film noir drama Crossfire (1947).
Early life
Ryan was born in Chicago, the first child of Mabel Arbutus (née Bushnell), a secretary, and Timothy Aloysius Ryan, who was from a wealthy family who owned a real estate firm.[1] He was of Irish (his paternal grandparents were from Thurles) and English descent. Ryan was raised Catholic[2] and educated at Loyola Academy.[3]
He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, where he held the school's heavyweight boxing title for all four years of his attendance, along with lettering in football and track.[4] After graduation, Ryan found employment as a stoker on a ship that traveled to Africa, a WPA worker, a ranch hand in Montana, and other odd jobs.[5]
He returned home in 1936 when his father died, and after a brief stint modeling clothes for a department store, he decided to become an actor.[5][6][7]
Career
Early appearances
In 1937 Ryan joined a little theater group in Chicago. The following year he enrolled in the Max Reinhardt Workshop in Hollywood.[8] His role in the 1939 play Too Many Husbands brought an offer from Paramount. Although he had done a screen test for them in 1938 and been turned down as "not the right type", the studio offered him a $75 a week contract.[9]
Paramount
In November 1939, Paramount signed Ryan to a six-month contract and announced he would play the lead in Golden Gloves (1940), citing his boxing experience at Dartmouth.[10] However, after a screen test with Gloves director Edward Dmytryk, the lead went to Richard Denning and Ryan was cast in a minor, but important role as a boxing "ringer".[11] He had his first credited role, while making a lasting association with the director in which they would make several films together.
Ryan appeared in Bombardier (1943), starring Pat O'Brien, and was fourth-billed in the Fred Astaire musical The Sky's the Limit (1943), playing a friend of Astaire. Both films were popular.[13]
RKO promoted him to star status in Tender Comrade (1943), where he was Ginger Rogers' leading man, directed for the third time by Dmytryk. It was a big hit. Also popular was Marine Raiders (1944), in which Ryan co-starred again alongside O'Brien.
When Ryan was discharged from the Marine Corps, he returned to RKO. They immediately cast Ryan in the Randolph Scott western, Trail Street (1947), which was very popular. However, his next film made with Joan Bennett, The Woman on the Beach (1947) directed by Jean Renoir, lost money.[14][15]
Ryan's breakthrough role was as an anti-Semitic killer in the Dmytryk-directed film noir Crossfire (1947), co-starring Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, and Gloria Grahame. The film was based on Richard Brooks's novel The Brick Foxhole, which reflected the tensions of barracks life during the war—something familiar to both Brooks and Ryan from their Pendleton experience. Crossfire was highly successful at the box office[16] and received several Academy Award nominations including a Best Supporting Actor for Ryan's performance.
Back at RKO, Ryan had one of his best roles in The Set-Up (1949), directed by Robert Wise, as an over-the-hill boxer who is brutally punished for refusing to take a dive. The Set-Up was a favorite of Ryan's.[18] He was top billed in The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), an anti-communist melodrama directed by Robert Stevenson, that was made at the prompting of RKO's new owner, Howard Hughes.
He then made the Western Best of the Badmen (1951), and costarred with John Wayne in Flying Leathernecks (1951), a World War II film directed by Ray. It was announced he was working on an original film story called The Alpine Slide about avalanches, but no film resulted.[21]
Ryan made his television debut in 1955 as Abraham Lincoln in the Screen Director's Playhouse adaptation of Christopher Morley's story "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog." As he explained to reporters, despite financial considerations, Ryan preferred to steer clear of any commitment to a TV series:
The only money in TV is in the series, and I want to stay out of those. Sure, I might make a million or so in a series, but I'd wind up being 'Sidewinder Sam' for the rest of my life.[25]
Along with William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, Ryan was goaded by Sam Peckinpah during the making of The Wild Bunch (1969). After production in Mexico moved from Parras to Torreón, his request to take a few days off to campaign for Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries was denied by Peckinpah. In his biography Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden, Bob Thomas wrote, "For ten days, Ryan reported to the set in makeup and costume. He never played a scene. Finally he grabbed Peckinpah by the shirtfront and growled, 'I'll do anything you ask me to do in front of the camera, because I'm a professional. But you open your mouth to me off the set, and I'll knock your teeth in.'"[30]
Ryan returned to the stage in a revival of The Front Page. It was one of the earlier productions developed by the Plumstead Playhouse (later the Plumstead Theatre Company), a Long Island-based repertory company founded by Ryan, Martha Scott and Henry Fonda;[31] the following winter, a film of the production (produced jointly by MPC and Plumstead) was broadcast nationally over the upstart Hughes TV Network.[32][33][6]
In 1970 Ryan, a heavy smoker, discovered he had inoperable cancer of the lymph glands. He decided to keep working, and said, "I've had a good shot at life."[34]
He originally refused the lead in Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973) with Rod Steiger because he wanted to take his wife to Europe, but she died of cancer in May 1972, and he ended up playing the part.[34][8] "Something very big is missing and I don't know what to put in its place," he said.[34]
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 Jr., and helped organize the short-lived Artists Help All Blacks, with Bill Cosby, Robert Culp, Sidney Poitier, and several other actors.[40]
Ryan often spoke about the dichotomy of his personal beliefs and his acting roles. At a screening of Odds Against Tomorrow, he appeared before the press to discuss "the problems of an actor like me playing the kind of character that in real life he finds totally despicable."[41] Ryan's roles as cynical, prejudiced, violent characters, often ran counter to the causes he embraced. He was a pacifist who starred in war movies, westerns, and violent thrillers. He was an opponent of McCarthyism, but appeared in the anti-communist propaganda film I Married a Communist, playing a nefarious communist agent. In socially progressive films such as Crossfire, Bad Day at Black Rock, Odds Against Tomorrow and Executive Action, he played bigoted villains or conspirators.
In the fall of 1951, the progressive Oakwood School was opened in Jessica and Robert Ryan's backyard in Los Angeles; founded by a small group of parents, created and based on their educational and child-rearing views. Three years later, the parents, including the Ryans, Sidney Harmon, Elizabeth Schappert, Wendy and Ross Cabeen, and Charles and Emilie Haas, bought and built the elementary school campus on Moorpark Street in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley.
Robert and Jessica remained married until her death from cancer in 1972. He died from lung cancer in New York City the following year at the age of 63.
"I've been lucky as hell with my career and my family," he said shortly before he died.[34]
Appraisal
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According to one profile of him written after his death:
Born to play beautifully tortured, angry souls... Ryan was a familiar movie face for more than two decades in Hollywood's classical years, his studio ups and downs, independent detours and outlier adventures paralleling the arc of American cinema as it went from a national pastime to near collapse. A little prettier and he might have been one of the golden boys of the golden age. But there could be something a touch menacing about his face (something open and sweet too), which bunched as tight as a fist, and his towering height (he stood 6 foot 4) at times loomed like a threat. The rage boiled up in him so quickly. It made him seem dangerous. He was known for his villains, and it was the complexity of these characters, their emotional and psychological kinks, that elevated even his lesser roles. He never achieved the supernova stardom of a Gable or Bogart, and these days Ryan's glower may be more familiar than his name. Yet he was the type of next-level star and B-movie stalwart that helped make old Hollywood great.[45]
^Jones, J.R. The Lives of Robert Ryan Wesleyan University Press, 11 May 2015
^Aug 2012, Ty Burr '80 | Jul-. "The Actor Who Knew Too Much". Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Retrieved 26 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
^ abRobert Ryan, In Search of Action: Ryan, In Search of Action
By PATRICIA BOSWORTH. New York Times 1 June 1969: D1
^From Chicago Sandhog to Hollywood Star: Robert Ryan: Acting Career Has Beginning in Night School
Zylstra, Freida. Chicago Daily Tribune 19 July 1950: a1.
^ abcdeRobert Ryan Dies of Cancer at 63: Played in More Than 80 Films in 30-Year Career ROBERT RYAN
Meagher, Ed. Los Angeles Times 12 July 1973: 3a.
^SCREEN NEWS HERE AND IN HOLLYWOOD: Paramount Signs Robert Ryan, Former Dartmouth Boxer, for 'Golden Gloves' RKO PLANS 'LITTLE ORVIE' Seeks John Barrymore 2d for Title Role--Mary Boland Gets Part in 'New Moon' RKO Signs Edmund O'Brien
By DOUGLAS W. CHURCHILL Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES 4 Nov 1939: 11.
^ abRichard Jewel, 'RKO Film Grosses: 1931-1951', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol 14 No 1, 1994 p41
^ROBERT RYAN GETS ROLE IN RKO FILM: Out of Marines, He Will CoStar With Joan Bennett for Studio in 'Desirable Woman' Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES 4 Jan 1946: 28.
^Robert Ryan, 'Crossfire' Hit, Gets Stardom in Boxing Film By Hedda Hopper. The Washington Post 1 July 1947: 17.
^RANDOM NOTES ABOUT PICTURES AND PEOPLE: Robert Ryan on 'Berlin Express' -- New Novel Acquired and Other Items
By A.H. WEILER. New York Times 20 July 1947: X3.
^ROBERT RYAN GETS LEAD IN RKO FILM: To Play Opposite Joan Fontaine in 'Bed of Roses' at Studio -- Work Starts This Month
By THOMAS F. BRADYS New York Times 1 June 1949: 43.
^DRATTLER DRAMA IS BOUGHT BY RKO: Studio Acquires 'Miami Story' as Vehicle for Robert Ryan --Author Named Producer Of Local Origin
By THOMAS F. BRADY Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES 28 Jan 1950: 10.
^Drama: Robert Ryan Scripts Avalanche Outline; Gig Young Western Prepared
Schallert, Edwin. Los Angeles Times 26 Jan 1951: A9.
^Ryan & Shaw
Thomson, David. Film Comment; New York Vol. 30, Iss. 1, (Jan 1994): 68.
^Ryan Proposes 'Lost Patrol;' Zero Mostel in 'Lunatics and Lovers'
Schallert, Edwin. Los Angeles Times 30 July 1955: 15.
^Drama: Andes Flies Over Andes; Shannon Upped, to Star; Don McGuire to Produce
Scheuer, Philip K. Los Angeles Times 3 Jan 1956: B7.
^ ab2 FILM FIRMS WIN CHAPLIN CASE: Roy Export and Lopert Get U. S. Injunction Barring 'Pirated' Showings By RICHARD NASON. New York Times 24 July 1959: 14.
^The Lives of Robert Ryan Dick, Bernard F. Film & History; Cleveland, OK Vol. 47, Iss. 1, (Summer 2017): 90-91.
Kennedy, Harold J. No Pickle, No Performance. An Irreverent Theatrical Excursion from Tallulah to Travolta. New York, Doubleday & Co., 1978. pp. 124–148
External links
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