Acting Career
Durning got his start on the New York stage and continues to return once or twice a decade. Among his most acclaimed performances were the role of Mayor George Sitkowski in the original production of Jason Miller's That Championship Season in 1973. His Tony Award winning performance as Big Daddy in the 1989 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Matthew Harrison Brady to George C. Scott's Henry Drummond in the Tony Randall produced revival of Inherit the Wind in 1997, and Charley in the 1980 revival of Death of a Salesman also starring Dustin Hoffman and Kate Reid .
Durning's breakthrough film performance was in The Sting. In the film, Durning plays a corrupt policeman, Lieutenant Snyder, who polices and hustles professional con artists. He doggedly pursues the young grifter Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford), only to become the griftee in the end. Since then he has amassed more than 100 film and television credits, including Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, Dog Day Afternoon (with Al Pacino), the sci-fi classic The Final Countdown, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and The Hindenburg. In 1976, he received both an Emmy and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the television mini-series Captains and the Kings. In 1979, he played Doc Hopper, the main villain in The Muppet Movie. In Tootsie he plays a suitor to a cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman. The two actors worked together again in a 1985 TV production of Death of a Salesman. In 1993, Durning guest starred in the Sean Penn-directed music video for "Dance with the One That Brought You" by Shania Twain.
More recently he has played a benevolent father to Holly Hunter in Home for the Holidays (1995), a cynical southern governor ("Pappy" O'Daniel) in O Brother, Where Art Thou, and as Victor Rasdale in Dirty Deeds. In 1996 he played Lew in the romantic comedy One Fine Day and Santa Claus in the Sesame Street home video "Elmo Saves Christmas". He played town doctor Harlan Eldridge on the Burt Reynolds sitcom Evening Shade (1990–1994). From 1998-2002, he subsequently had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond as the Barone family's long-suffering parish priest, Father Hubley. He also played the voice of recurring character Francis Griffin in the animated series Family Guy until the episode Peter's Two Dads where the character died (although he later returned in the episode Family Goy to voice the ghost of Francis).
For his numerous roles on television, Durning has earned nine Emmy Award nominations. He has also received Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nominations for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982 and for To Be or Not to Be in 1983. He won a Golden Globe in 1990 for his supporting role in the television miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts. He appeared on the FX television series Rescue Me, playing Mike Gavin, the retired firefighter father of Denis Leary's character.
Durning was honored with the Life Achievement Award at the 14th Annual Screen Actors Guild Award Ceremony on January 27, 2008. On July 31, 2008, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to the one of his idols, James Cagney.
His daughter, Jeanine Durning, is a well-known New York-based modern dance performer and choreographer.
Read more about this topic: Charles Durning
Famous quotes containing the words acting and/or career:
“Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.”
—Glenda Jackson (b. 1937)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)