For real life badassness, Charles Durning. His is an interesting story.
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Charles Durning: Decorated Normandy War Veteran
"For twelve and a half weeks, two million men fought in the fields of Normandy. This year, the National Memorial Day Concert will commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the World War II Allied landing at Normandy, universally regarded as the turning point of the war.
During the concert, Charles Durning, one of America's premier character actors and a U.S. Army veteran of Normandy, helps bring to life the moving stories of the men who participated in that valiant air and sea campaign. As a 17-year-old infantryman, Durning was among the first wave of men to land on Omaha Beach. During that campaign and later in the war, he was wounded three times and awarded three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.
Durning's impressive 50-year acting career has been crowned by a Tony Award and nominations for two Oscars and four Emmy awards, yet he never lost sight of his wartime experiences. In 1990, when he was making his Tony-winning star turn as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he opened up in a People Magazine feature. "There's only so much you can witness," he said of his time overseas. Indeed, his war decorations were hard-earned. Durning was the only man to survive a machine gun ambush on Omaha Beach - and he had to rise above serious wounds and kill seven German gunners to do it.
Months later in Belgium, he was stabbed eight times by a German teenage soldier wielding a bayonet; Durning eventually bludgeoned him to death with a rock. He was released from the hospital in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was taken prisoner. After escaping a subsequent massacre of the other prisoners, he was obliged by American forces to return to the scene and help identify bodies. Finally, a bullet in the chest a few months later ended his relentless tour of duty - and began four years of repeated hospitalizations for his physical and psychological injuries.
In an interview with Parade Magazine, Durning said of his initial post-war years, "I dropped into a void for almost a decade. The physical injuries heal first. It's your mind that's hard to heal." And, as he points out, it's not just a matter of what is done to you, but what you find yourself capable of doing. "There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don't want anyone to know about. There's terror and repulsion in us, horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting."
Acting was precisely what gave Durning a new lease on life. The seeds had been planted when he was a boy, growing up in Highland Falls, New York, with his mother, a West Point laundress, and four brothers and sisters (his father, a sergeant in the Army, had died when he was 12). After leaving home at 16, he worked as an usher at a Buffalo burlesque house, where the antics of the bawdy comics - and a one-night chance to fill in for one who was too drunk to go on himself - convinced him that a life on the stage was what he wanted. " .
