"I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against," Robert Ryan once remarked, referring to the intolerance, greed and brutality of some of his characters. His portrayals of racial bigotry were especially ironic because he was a tireless campaigner for civil rights.

Ryan's dark, craggy looks, raspy voice and black Irish temperament made him well-suited to play villains, film noir anti-heroes and various combinations thereof. Often cast as a second lead, he was always compelling and easily held his own with such powerhouse performers as Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Ida Lupino and Burt Lancaster. Onstage he dared to partner with Katharine Hepburn in a 1960 production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

He was born Robert Bushnell Ryan in Chicago in 1909 and attended Dartmouth College, where he held the school's heavyweight boxing title for four years. He also won a boxing championship while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps as a drill instructor. While studying acting in Hollywood, he appeared in theater productions and made his movie debut in an uncredited bit in the Bob Hope movie The Ghost Breakers (1940).

Ryan signed with RKO, where he played a number of small roles before gaining attention as Ginger Rogers' stalwart serviceman husband in Tender Comrade (1943). His breakthrough year was 1947, when, among other things, he shared hero duties with Randolph Scott in the Western Trail Street, brooded in Jean Renoir's moody drama The Woman on the Beach and stole Edward Dmytryk's brilliant film noir mystery Crossfire from two other Roberts, Mitchum and Young. Ryan's disturbing portrait of a vicious anti-Semite in the latter film brought him many accolades including his only Oscar® nomination - as Best Supporting Actor.

Among Ryan's many other film appearances in the 1940s were Return of the Bad Men (1948), another Western stint as second lead to Randolph Scott's hero, with Ryan as The Sundance Kid; The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Joseph Losey's gentle pacifist fable with Dean Stockwell as the child of the title; and, in 1949, two more outstanding film noir melodramas, Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948) and Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949).

The 1950s were also busy years for Ryan, who made nearly 30 feature films during the decade along with several TV appearances. For once, in Nicholas Ray's film about the Marine Corps' Flying Leathernecks (1951) he plays the more humane character opposite John Wayne's hard-boiled commander. In another combat film, Anthony Mann's set-in-Korea Men in War (1957), it's Ryan's turn to play the by-the-book officer. Ryan is dominant as the patriarch of a slovenly backwoods family in Mann's film version of Erskine Caldwell's steamy novel God's Little Acre (1958).

Ryan gives one of his most vivid performances as the brutal, bullying Claggart of Billy Budd (1962), Peter Ustinov's version of the famous Herman Melville story. In Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969), a follow-up to 1954's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Ryan takes over from James Mason as the Jules Verne character. He is a standout in the powerful acting ensembles of three violent, influential films: Richard Brooks' The Professionals (1966), Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).

Among Ryan's final roles before his death in 1973 were two more ruthless characters, a mob boss in The Outfit (1973) and a greedy businessman involved in the assassination of JFK in Executive Action (1973). He finished his career with a truly splendid performance (possibly his best) as Larry Slade in a film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1973).

Ryan was married to one woman, Jessica Cadwalader, from 1939 until her death in 1972. They had three children.

by Roger Fristoe