The word to describe Robert Ryan was 'dependable' - which is not to suggest exactly that he was a second-stringer. He was not 'a shimmering, glowing star in the cinema firmament' - as Jean Hagen described herself in Singin' in the rain - but belongs in a category unique to himself (or almost - Van Heflin would belong to this category and perhaps Arthur Kennedy): the second-billed leading man. For 25 years. He never went from star to supporting player. He remained a star, but usually as the hero's friend or the heavy.His leads were mainly in programmers. To achieve a career of such longevity, without undulation, and to sustain it when most ageing actors fall away, suggests an even and reliable talent, one respected by producers and critics. He was a sympathetic, relaxed, forceful but rather tentative hero, limited by what he calls his 'long, seamy face': Cary Grant, he once pointed out, because of his charm and gifts, got the glamorous locations, but he did his films 'in deserts with a dirty shirt and a two day growth of beard'. The eyes which in his pleasant parts could show a crinkly humour could also suggest paranoia, someone withdrawn from the warm ways of the world. He was a glinting, wiry, villain. Few actors of his stature have cared to risk unsympathetic parts and he liked to point out that he had not done that many. Still, he said: 'I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against.'

He was born in Chicago in 1909, where his father was an executive of the Ryan Contracting Co. As a child he was taught boxing and at Dartmouth he was college heavyweight champion; he majored in dramatic literature and planned to go into journalism. But these were the Depression years. He refused to go into his father's business and did various jobs - ship's stoker, ranch-hand, sand-hog, salesman and even debt-collector for two weeks. Back in Chicago he did some modelling and became interested in amateur dramatics. A friend of his mother got him a municipal appointment, but a lucky oil investment enabled him to seek professional drama training; he went to California to enroll at the Pasadena Playhouse but instead joined Max Reinhardt's Theatrical Workshop (he married fellow pupil Jessica Cadwalader in 1939; she gave up acting but published some children's books and mystery stories). After graduating, he got a job in a local musical, 'Too many Husbands', based on a Maugham play, and $75 a week. He had bit parts in Golden Gloves (40), directed by Edward Dmytryk, as a boxer; Queen of the Mob; North West Mounted Police; and Texas Rangers Ride Again (41). Paramount dropped him.

He got an unbilled bit in The Feminine Touch and then a job in stock on Cape Cod, where he was in 'A Kiss for Cinderella' with Luise Rainer. Her ex-husband, Clifford Odets, saw him and offered him the juvenile in his 'Clash by Night' on Broadway, and he was seen in that by Pare Lorentz, then working for RKO. Lorentz had made a number of award-winning documentaries and was preparing his first feature, a Depression story called Name Age and Occupation. Ryan was signed to play the lead opposite Frances Dee, on a long-term contract starting at $600 a week. After months of preparation it was decided that wartime audiences would not want a Depression picture and it was cancelled. Instead, Ryan made a series of war-themed movies: Bombardier (43) starring Pat O'Brien and Randolph Scott, as a student bombardier; The Sky's the Limit, as Fred Astaire's airforce buddy; Behind the Rising Sun, directed by Dmytryk, with Margo and J. Carroll Naish, as an American boxer in Japan; The Iron Major, as a priest, with O'Brien as a (real) World War I hero; and Gangway for Tomorrow - which was the assembly-line where the chief characters worked.

Ginger Rogers then asked for him as her leading man - the 'dead' husband in flash-back in Tender Comrade, which was notable only because it gave him a cachet among studio workers - because of his diplomatic handling of the rightest star and the left-wing director and writer (Dmytryk and Dalton Trumbo respectively). At Pat O'Brien's request he was given co-star billing alongside him in a programmer, Marine Raiders (44). Then he joined the marines in actuality. He returned to RKO to play Randolph Scott's comrade-in-arms in a Western, Trail Street (47), and then had his best film role to date, in Woman on the Beach, as the mixed-up coast-guard egged on by Joan Bennett to murder her blind husband (Charles Bickford). Jean Renoir directed, with an untypical lack of cohesion - but Ryan liked working with him.

His next film also advanced his career: Crossfire, directed by Dmytryk and based on a novel by Richard Brooks (whom Ryan had known in the marines), about three army buddies, one of whom murders a homosexual. In the film the victim became simply a Jew and the film was thus praised as a tract on anti-Semitism. It benefited, rather, from the new, postwar realism, but today on any count is merely a conventional thriller. Ryan was mean and ugly as the murderer.

He did two more programmers, Berlin Express (48), a Nazi melodrama with Merle Oberon, and Return of the Badmen, a Randolph Scott Western in which he was a sadist called the Sundance Kid. Then he played a psychiatrist in The Boy with Green Hair (played by Dean Stockwell), a pretentious allegory - directed by Joseph Losey - which was supposed to Mean Something. But Act of Violence at MGM was a good film - perhaps the best that Ryan was in - about an ex-veteran, a solid citizen (Van Heflin), suddenly plagued by an old buddy. Ryan was fine as this limping Nemesis; Fred Zinnemann directed. Ryan had another good director, Max Ophüls, on Caught (49), but the corn was high - a multi-millionaire (based on Howard Hughes, as Hughes recognized, without rancour) given to tantrums and locked in a loveless marriage with Barbara Bel Geddes. The Set-Up brought him the most acclaim, as a washed-up boxer who latches on to integrity in his come-back fight: Robert Wise directed and it is still the best film on the fight game.

The next film flopped: I Married a Communist, with Laraine Day as the 'I'; after some months it was reissued as The Woman on Pier 13 and did no better. He did not have much to do in The Secret Fury (50), as Claudette Colbert's bemused spouse in this silly mystery; or in Born To Be Bad, losing Joan Fontaine to Mel Ferrer. RKO were not at this stage doing much worthwhile, but these were modestly entertaining: Best of the Badmen (51), as a Yankee officer in peril when there is no murder evidence; Flying Leathernecks, as John Wayne's second in command; The Racket, with Robert Mitchum, as a racketeer/killer; and On Dangerous Ground (52), with Ida Lupino, as a disillusioned fist-happy cop.

Fritz Lang's version of Clash by Night knew the level of its material: Ryan played the embittered lover, Barbara Stanwyck was the tramp-wife and Keith Andes had the part Ryan had played on the stage. His RKO contract finished with another study of depravity, Beware my Lovely, based on Mel Dinelli's play 'The Man', as the handyman who terrorizes housewife Ida Lupino.

As a freelance he played the same sort of parts in the same sort of pictures - only some of them were bigger-budgeted. He was a cattle-rustler in Horizon's West; a killer in The Naked Spur (53), with James Stewart; a deep-sea diver in City Beneath the Sea; and a millionaire playboy left to perish in the desert Inferno (by faithless wife Thonda Fleming). At the end of Alaska Seas (54) - a remake of Spawn of the North - he was, deservedly, killed beneath an avalanche. About Mrs. Leslie was a soap opera with Shirley Booth, made touching by the playing of the two of them: he was a 'splendid partner' to her, thought 'Variety'. In Her Twelve Men he won Greer Garson and, again at MGM - after a quick trip to New York to play Coriolanus - was another killer bent on blowing out Spencer Tracy, spending his Bad Day at Black Rock. That was a high and Ryan's career hit a low with the next two, Escape to Burma (55), maybe the worst film either he or Barbara Stanwyck did (painted studio jungles), and Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo, which was even more needlessly vicious than most of Fuller's films. Ryan, a G.I. turned gangster, was top-billed and the combination of him, Robert Stack and Fuller was a drag at the box-office.

20th, who produced, gave him something more deserving: The Tall Men, with Clark Gable, as the double-crossing businessman who hires him. There followed: The Proud Ones (56) with Virginia Mayo, as the (good) town marshal; Back From Eternity, as a drunken pilot; and Men in War (57), as the platoon looey who eventually succumbs to truculent sarge Aldo Ray ('Okay, Montana, we can use you'). For the same director, Anthony Mann, and company, Ryan and Ray did God's Little Acre (58), From Erskine Caldwell's bestseller. Ryan was the Georgia farmer convinced he would find gold on his farm: 'the performance of his career' said 'Variety', adding, 'he opens a whole vista of roles for himself by this portrayal, as remarkable, perhaps, as Walter Huston's performance in The Treasure of Sierra Madre'. The film did not do well, but was one of Ryan's own favorites. He was wooden as the editor in Lonelyhearts, seemingly unconvinced by the cynicisms given him as dialogue. There was a good, bleak, Western, Day of the Outlaw (59), and then another disquieting study in prejudice - the nigger-hating thug in Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, involved in a bank heist with Harry Belafonte. It flopped.

He had begun to appear on TV, notably in the leads of 'The Great Gatsby' (58) with Jeanne Crain and 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' with Ann Todd. In 1960 at the Stratford, Conn., festival he played Antony to Katharine Hepburn's Cleopatra, around which time he moved North for two films: Ice Palace (60), playing a character called Thor Storm (it was based on a novel by Edna Ferber), and The Canadians (61), a British quota picture which could be described as a North-Western. He was a mountie and opera singer Teresa Stratas was a squaw. He was ludicrously miscast in samuel Bronston's Spanish-made King of Kings, but so was everyone else - Jeffrey Hunter no less in the title-role, Brigid Bazlen as Salome and Siobhan McKenna as the Virgin. He was John the Baptist - and he only did it because he got $50.000 for a week's work, he said. Nicholas Ray directed. His films for a few years were lensed in Europe; The Longest Day (62), as a brigadier-general; Ustinov's Billy Budd, excellent as the vile Claggart, a role he found difficult because there was no reason for Claggart's villainy; The Crooked Road (64), with Stewart Granger, as a journalist; and Battle of the Bulge and La Guerre Secrète/The Dirty Game, in both as a general, in both with Henry Fonda. However, in the midst of them he returned to New York to play the title-role in an Irving Berlin musical, 'Mr. President'.

In Hollywood, he was one of several names in the next three: The Professionals (66), with Burt Lancaster; The Busy Body (67), a B starring Sid Caesar, uninterested as a crime-boss; and The Dirty Dozen, as a colonel. He was a cattle-rustler again in Hour of the Gun, then had a brief bit as a deserter in Custer of the West (68), made not in the West, but in Spain, with Robert Shaw as Custer, He remained there for the Spanish-Italian Escondido/Un Minuto per Pregare Un Instante per Morire, with Arthur Kennedy. His general's uniform was dry-cleaned for Lo Sbarco di Anzio/Anzio, directed by Dmytryk. After playing Othello and Father Tyrone in 'Long Day's Journey into Night' at Nottingham, he returned to the US for The Wild Bunch (69), at his best as the reluctant head of the bounty-hunters. He was back in Britain to play Nemo in Captain Nemo and the Underwater City; then was back in the West, with Burt Lancaster, in Lawman (71). In contrast, he played a tycoon in The Love Machine, with Dyan Cannon, an unsuccessful soap opera based on an even sillier and 'sexier' book by Jaqueline Susann, supposedly about a TV exec (John Phillip Law). Then he appeared in Pancho Villa (72), with Telly Savalas, made in Spain, and René Clément's La Course du Lièvre à travers les Champs, made in Canada. After opposing Rod Steiger in The Lolly Madonna XXX (73), he was in a film-play, The Iceman Cometh which starred Lee Marvin, and The Outfit, with Robert Duvall, in which he was a crime syndicate boss. The latter two were released posthumously and his last screened work was a TV movie, The Man Without a Country, with Cliff Robertson. He died of cancer in 1973.