Born in Chicago in 1909, of an Irish family in the building trades, Ryan was a shy kid with a precocious fondness for Shakespeare. His father nudged him into the boxing ring in an attempt to knock the bookishness out of him. The gangly kid surprised: he ended up at Dartmouth, where he studied theatre and held the university’s heavyweight boxing crown four years running. Ryan’s first love was writing, not acting, and he diligently punched out prose with the hope of becoming a playwright or journalist. The Depression encouraged him to be practical.

Ryan’s peripatetic pursuit of a living wage was S.O.P. among Depression-era men (although it would stagger the stunted initiative of later generations): engine-room janitor on an Africa-bound freighter, ranch hand in Montana, cemetery-plot pitchman, collector for a loan company, miner, prospector - anything that held promise of a payday.

In ’38 the winds shifted when Ryan risked a $300 buy-in on a friend’s oil well, and it came a-gusher. Ryan took his two-grand grubstake and headed west. The nest egg funded a year in Max Reinhardt’s acting school. Even though Paramount scouts said, after viewing a screen test, that he was "not the type for pictures," Ryan persevered. He hit the local boards hard, even singing and dancing. He ended up with a $75-per-week contract – at Paramount.

Ryan also signed a matrimonial deal with actress Jessica Cadwalader, another pupil in Reinhardt’s class. She was ambitious and talented, but as was so often the case back then, she made the career sacrifice for her husband. (She’d later become a successful author of young adult fiction.)

In the early Forties, awaiting the draft, Ryan fought the Axis on Paramount sound stages, fattening a growing résumé of „B" war films, if not his reputation. He returned to the legit stage in a minor role in the Broadway production of Clifford Odets’s Clash by Night. It bombed, but an RKO scout caught Ryan’s act, and signed him up after his Paramount pact expired.

For the next two years, Ryan sank into more studio foxholes, playing steely soldiers who rarely drew breath at the fade-out. One of these concoctions, a homefront weeper called Tender Comrade (1943), was Ryan’s first real starring role, and it united him for the third time with director Edward Dmytryk. He played the groom of Ginger Rogers, who enjoys a single night of wedded bliss before being shipped out. He dies in combat, leaving Rogers to cope as a widowed mother. The actress’s mother, Lela, who guarded Ginger’s career like a junkyard dog, insisted the studio remove the pinkest lines that Dalton Trumbo’s script had her daughter spouting. "This is a democracy – that means share and share alike," for example. Lela Rogers was proud to be a Red-sniffing pioneer.

Later that year Ryan signed on with the real military. First role: a Marine Corps drill instructor at Camp Pendleton. Those two years no doubt helped him distill the leathered-up fury he’d bring to future films. Mustering out, Ryan met fellow jarhead Richard Brooks, who’d recently published The Brick Foxhole. Ryan said he’d kill for the part of Monty, and Brooks said he’d put in a good word for him if a film version ever hit paydirt. Two years later it did, renamed, and Crossfire launched Ryan’s career.

Much later, after he’d breathed miserable life into some of the sorriest bastards ever seen on a screen, Ryan professed that he regretted ever making Crossfire. He became so identified with tightly-wound characters that no casting director could see him as a heroic leading man. Ryan rued the loss of numerous „A" roles to Gregory Peck. Even when portraying a good-hearted charmer, as in About Mrs. Leslie (1954), a thundercloud of ambiguity hung over Ryan. Was he projecting it? Or was it just that viewers couldn’t shake from their minds the seething anger they’d seen in Monty Montgomery (Crossfire), Joe Parkson (Act of Violence), Smith Ohlrig (Caught), Stoker Thompson (The Set-Up), Jim Wilson (On Dangerous Ground), Nick Scanlon (The Racket), and Earl Pfeiffer (Clash by Night)? A critic for the New York Times, reviewing Act of Violence, captured Ryan’s persona in two words: "infernally taut."

In the climate of the Fifties, studios shied away from contemporary urban dramas. They favored colorful widescreen spectacles free of political pitfalls. Ryan got sent West. He loathed making westerns, but found himself saddling up with monotonous regularity. Ruminating on his career in 1971 in Films and Filming, Ryan talked about how he envied urbane Cary Grant, and the fabulous locations – Monte Carlo, Paris, the Riviera – in which the debonair star always seemed to get work. "I’m fated to work in faraway, desolate places ... in deserts with a dirty shirt and a two-day growth of beard and bad food. But that’s an act of birth. I get all the worst locations because of the way I look. But I am an urban character. I was born in the big city. I also have a long, seamy face which adapts itself to westerns – but I don’t for one moment consider myself a western actor essentially."

In the prime of his career, Ryan, Jessica, and their three children lived with an anti-Hollywood modesty. The parents took intense interest in the education of their children, going so far as to fund and construct, in 1953, the Oakwood School, a private learning center offering an alternative to crowded public schools and rich-kid country clubs. Ryan called it „watered-down progressive", and it was the first time his political and philosophical tenets brought him grief. Conservative neighbours egged the building and painted crosses on its doors. A committed leftist, Ryan managed to elude persecution during the witchhunt; but by the mid-‘50s he was active in the ACLU, a big supporter of the UN, and president of the Southern California branch of the United World Federalists.

Meanwhile, Ryan continued to portray the men he most despised – amoral racists like Reno Smith in Bad Day at Black Rock (MGM, 1954). It was an updated Western in which Spencer Tracy played a one-armed vet who rides into a dusty desert town to present a Japanese farmer with his son’s posthumous war medal. Surprise: a gang of rabid townsfolk, led by Ryan, has already murdered the old man in a fit of racism disguised as patriotism. You’d think Ryan couldn’t get much more evil than this, but somehow he upped the ante in Odds against Tomorrow (UA, 1959) and Peter Ustinov’s salty adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd (Allied Artists, 1962). Films in Review called Ryan’s turn as the antagonistic master-at-arms John Claggart the „apotheosis of screen villainy."

Although he built a solid career foundation with the diligence of a stone-mason, Ryan felt trapped by the narrow confines of the parts he was offered. During the Fifties he poured his frustrations over ice and drank them down, becoming a functioning alcoholic. He believed his rejection of the Hollywood lifestyle was working against him. Thinking it might help his career, Ryan moved the family into a tony Holmby Hills spread. Daughter Lisa said it "swallowed us up." She recalls many occasions when her father would sit alone in the unlit kitchen, nursing one of many beverages, railing to the acting gods: "Goddamned ‘B’ pictures! That’s all they give me. Goddamned ‘B’ pictures!"

By the early Sixties Ryan had become one of Tinseltown’s highest-profile liberals, "a militant dove," leading the Southern California Committee on Sane Nuclear Policy, and an outspoken fixture at early Vietnam war protests. In ’62, Ryan uprooted his clan and moved to New York, both to pursue more stage work, and dodge death threats from the John Birch Society.

After several years of stage work, Ryan again went West, literally and figuratively. Now in his sixties, he found that his leathery countenance was ideally suited to a new generation of gritty westerns, such as The Professionals (Columbia, 1966) and Hour of the Gun (UA, 1967). As Deke Thornton in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (WB, 1969), he and William Holden engaged in a Mexican stand-off over which of the two craggy veterans projected a more bone-tired weariness.

Ryan’s last act was perhaps his best. In John Frankenheimer’s film version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1973), Ryan gave a searing portrayal of derelict political activist Larry Slade. It was an all-star cast, but Ryan dominated with a performance of life-or-death intensity. Sadly, he wasn’t reaching far for inspiration. Jessica, only 57, had died suddenly the previous year, from cancer. Ryan also had developed the disease, and knew his days were numbered.

On July 11, 1973, he succumbed. Pete Hamill offered a lovely tribute: „There should be a poem of farewell for Robert Ryan. [It] should express his quiet presence through so many lonely years when few people were struggling to bring decency to the world .... Life, death, loneliness, loss: these were some of the things we learned from the quiet art of Robert Ryan, who was a good man in a bad time."

Ryan’s pacifistic social work has been long forgotten. But his screen image is still frighteningly fresh, offering a scary, and tragic, message about the unbridled hatred lurking in ignorant men.

Next bio