Robert Ryan

<p>Robert Bushnell Ryan was born on November 11, 1909, in Chicago, Illinois. Standing 6-foot-4, Ryan was an undefeated heavyweight boxing champion at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1932. Enduring the Great Depression as a ditch-digger, ship stoker, and farmhand before finding his calling in acting, Ryan served honorably as a drill instructor in the United States Marine Corps during World War II at Camp Pendleton.</p>
<p>Following the war, Ryan emerged as one of Hollywood's supreme screen presences. In 1947, he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Edward Dmytryk's noir landmark <em>Crossfire</em>, playing an anti-Semitic soldier who murders a Jewish civilian. In Robert Wise's 1949 masterpiece <em>The Set-Up</em>, Ryan delivered one of cinema's greatest sports performances as an aging, principled prizefighter who refuses to take a dive.</p>
<p>Over a three-decade career, Ryan commanded the screen opposite Spencer Tracy in <em>Bad Day at Black Rock</em> (1955), played John Claggart in <em>Billy Budd</em> (1962), and starred as Deke Thornton in Sam Peckinpah's revisionist western masterpiece <em>The Wild Bunch</em> (1969). In extraordinary contrast to the sadistic racists and bitter villains he mastered on screen, Ryan in private life was a gentle humanist, civil rights pioneer who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, co-founded the progressive Oakwood School, and served as national co-chair of SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy).</p>