Bob the Pussy Di Queero is no match for legend Lawrence Tierney!
Reservoir Dogs and later careerIn 1991, Quentin Tarantino cast him in a supporting role as crime lord Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs. The success of the film bookended Tierney's career in playing gangsters. In an homage to his first starring role, Tierney reports that one of his henchmen was "dead as Dillinger".[23] During production, Tierney's off-screen antics both amused and disturbed the cast and crew. At the end of his first week of directing Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino got into a fist fight with Tierney and fired him. He later referred to Tierney as "a complete lunatic" who "just needed to be sedated".[24]
Despite his reputation as a brawler and being difficult to work with, Tierney remained in steady demand as a character actor in Hollywood until he suffered a mild stroke in 1995 which made him gradually slow his career. He had suffered a previous stroke in 1982. He turned to doing voice-over work on animated features and made occasional appearances in film and television (most of which feature him only sitting) as his health slowly deteriorated until his death. One of Tierney's later roles was an uncredited cameo appearance as Bruce Willis' invalid father in Armageddon (1998) in a short scene which ended up being deleted from the theatrical version. The same year, his long-time agent, Don Gerler, recounted Tierney's continuing troubles with the law: "A few years back [in 1994] I was still bailing him out of jail. He was 75-years-old and still the toughest guy in the bar!"[3] His final acting role was a small part in the 1999 independent film Evicted, written and directed by his nephew Michael Tierney, after which Lawrence Tierney, then age 80, retired from acting altogether.
Off-screen troublesTierney's numerous arrests for being drunk and disorderly and jail terms for assault on civilians and lawmen alike took a toll on his career.[1] He was an admitted alcoholic who tried to go sober in 1982 after having a mild stroke, once observing during a 1987 interview that he "threw away about seven careers through drink".[21]
Between 1944 and 1951, Tierney was arrested over 12 times in Los Angeles for brawling, frequently for drunkenness which included ripping a public telephone off a wall in a bar, hitting a waiter in the face with a sugar bowl for refusing to serve him any more drinks, and attempting to choke a taxi driver.[25] He was jailed for three months for brawling in May 1947[26] and again in June 1949[27] and drunkenness in January 1949[28] and October 1950.[29] His legal troubles included a 90-day jail sentence which he served from August to October 1951 for breaking a New York college student's jaw during another barroom brawl. He served 66 days in the city jail in Chicago, Illinois from March to May 1952 for drunk and disorderly charges.[30][31][32] In October 1951, he was sent to a mental hospital in Chicago after being found disheveled in a church.[33] In New York City, he was arrested for assault and battery of a barroom pianist in August 1953 and again in October 1958 for resisting arrest and assaulting two police officers in another barroom brawl.[34][35] At the time of his October 1958 arrest outside a Manhattan bar, The New York Times reported that he had been arrested six times in California and five in New York City on similar charges.[35]
In January 1973, he was stabbed in a bar fight on the West Side of Manhattan.[36] Two years later, Tierney was questioned by New York City police in connection with the apparent suicide of a 24-year-old woman who had jumped from the window of her high-rise apartment. Tierney told police "I had just gotten there, and she just went out the window." He never was arrested or charged with the young woman's death.[3] The apparent suicide closely resembles the death of Rosa, played by Allene Roberts in the 1951 film The Hoodlum.[improper synthesis?] Tierney's Vincent Lubeck, the hoodlum of the title, is suspected of driving Rosa into throwing herself off a roof shortly after talking to Lubeck.
In July 1991, during the filming of Reservoir Dogs, Tierney shot at his nephew in a drunken rage at his Hollywood apartment, and was arrested and jailed. He was released for a day from the jail to continue filming, as recounted by the film's director Quentin Tarantino in an interview. As a result, Tarantino never again worked with or hired Tierney to act in his films.[37]
Personal life and deathWith much of his career and personal life repeatedly embroiled in legal problems and hampered by chronic alcoholism, Tierney elected to never marry despite having several short-term relationships with a number of women in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He did, however, father a daughter named Elizabeth who was born in 1961.[1][3][38]
Both of Tierney's younger brothers preceded him in death, Edward dying in 1983 and Gerard (actor Scott Brady) in 1985. On February 26, 2002, at age 82, Lawrence Tierney died in his sleep of pneumonia in a Los Angeles nursing home where he had been residing for one year after suffering another debilitating stoke.[39]
Scary guy on Seinfeld 
