Charles Durning.
The received the lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild this year. Here's a bit of his non-acting bio:
Widowed when Durning was 12, his mother worked as a laundress at the U.S. Military Academy in nearby West Point.
As a teenage usher in a burlesque house, Durning was hired to replace a drunken “second banana” on stage, then hoofed his way through upstate New York as half of ballroom dancing act for 11 years.
Durning’s early career was punctuated by stints as an elevator operator, Western Union delivery boy, cab driver, bartender, night watchman, boxer and construction worker.
His heroic yet horrifying experiences during World War II loomed large in shaping his 20s. He was in the first wave to land on Omaha Beach during the D-Day Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, killing seven German gunners and suffering serious machine gun wounds to his right leg and shrapnel wounds over his body in that bloody battle.
Later, he was stabbed eight times with a bayonet by a young German soldier, whom he killed with a rock in hand-to-hand combat.
Taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, he was one of a few survivors of the infamous attack on American POWs at Malmedy, Belgium, and was the sole survivor of 40 men who took out a German machine gun nest. For his valor he was honored with three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.
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