February 28, 2026: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

An update of a column written and published in 2018.

Born on this date more than a hundred years ago, Charles Durning had a major six-decade career as an actor. He won a Tony Award, was nominated for two Academy Awards, and worked as an actor right up to his death in 2012, just shy of his ninetieth birthday (his last two films were released posthumously). Though he accomplished a great deal in his life, none of it came easy. He has one of the most fascinating biographies of any actor I know, and today is as good a day as any to tell some stories and celebrate his legacy.

Born February 28, 1923 in Highland Falls, N.Y., Durning was the ninth of ten children. Five of his sisters died of smallpox or scarlet fever in childhood (three of them within two weeks), and his father, who had lost a leg in World War I, died when Durning was still a teenager. Forced to go to work, young Charlie dropped out of school at sixteen (happily by his own account, as he never considered himself a good student). Leaving home, he went about performing odd jobs from town to town: a munitions factory, on a slag heap and in a barbed-wire factory, finally landing more than 350 miles away in Buffalo, as an usher in a burlesque house. One day, he talked his way into going on stage to replace a drunk comedian who had failed to show up. Since Durning knew the routine and got a few laughs, he found a calling. In his own words: “I became hooked on show business.”

Then World War II came and, after a year’s worth of training, Private First Class Charles Durning was sent with his outfit to England on Feb. 18, 1944, just shy of his 21st birthday and just in time to prepare for the invasion of France. To say that he saw action at D-Day is an understatement. In his own words, Durning claimed to have been “the second man off my barge, and the first and third man got killed.” Whether that’s an exaggeration or not, the truth is that he was there and survived the initial assault relatively unscathed. Considering that the official count of Americans and allies who died that day came to 4,413, he was truly one of the lucky ones. Ironically, he was wounded just a few days later by shrapnel from an exploding mine set off by long range German artillery on Omaha Beach. After six months in a hospital, he and his Purple Heart were put back on the front lines to combat the German Ardennes offensive in Belgium. “If you could pull a trigger, you had to go up. So I went up. I got wounded twice up there and got the Silver Star. But I got out. I did the March to Malmedy — I remember that.”

What Durning is referring to was how he and the rest of his company were captured and forced to march through a pine forest at Malmedy, the scene of an infamous massacre in which the Germans opened fire on almost 90 prisoners. Durning was among the few to escape. He also killed a young German soldier in hand-to-hand combat, a story that was very difficult for him to speak about. In fact, according to his family, he only began to talk about these experiences at the end of his life, ending decades of silence.

After the war, there’s no question that Durning suffered PTSD. Plagued with survivor’s guilt, the constant rejection he was getting as an actor kept his sense of self dangerously in check. But having a history doing every odd job imaginable had its benefits. “I taught ballroom dancing at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio. Every time I was out of work, they’d give me a job as a dance teacher. Dancing came easy to me. Acting came hard.” He also told of how he was perceived as an actor early on: “I was kicked out of drama school because I had no talent and no hope of buying any if there was any for sale. And you know who they kicked out with me, who ‘had no talent’ either? Jason Robards.” (Ironically, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts created a scholarship in honor of him in 2007, along with two other alumni, Anne Bancroft and Gena Rowlands).

It was the producer Joseph Papp, who even before he built the Public Theatre, went to bat for the actor. Hiring him first in 1962 to perform Shakespeare outdoors in and around the city with a roving company, Durning would eventually be in 35 plays for Papp over the course of a dozen years. Occasionally, he found other work either on or off-Broadway, but few pushed him beyond the boundaries of being a utility player. Two musical flops came and went quickly, like Pousse-Café and Drat! The Cat!, and in 1964, he was cast as the village priest in a new musical called Fiddler on the Roof. It was with this show that Durning felt like he might finally have a hit on his hands. Except that a week before Fiddler was to open on Broadway, director Jerome Robbins wanted to write Durning out of the musical, since the part of the priest had become superfluous. “I hope you don’t mind,” Robbins asked Durning. Mind? As Durning tells it: “Zero [Mostel] and I became friends. He tried to get me another role, selling sewing machines. That didn’t work. I was devastated. My wife was pregnant. I was out of a job. Joe Papp said, ‘No you’re not. Come down Monday.’ By the time Fiddler finished I had done 35 plays for Joe.”

Two months after Fiddler closed at the end of a record-breaking eight-year-run, Durning was back on Broadway, cast once again by his friend Joe Papp. That Championship Season, by a young actor and fledgling playwright named Jason Miller, which had proven a sizable critical and commercial hit at Papp's Public Theatre, opened on Broadway in September 1972, winning the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize the following spring. Its five-man ensemble were the toast of the town, and when Durning left the show it was with his best paying gig to date. As the crooked cop in The Sting, a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Durning now had a foothold in Hollywood, going on to play numerous outstanding character parts in major motion pictures for decades.

To count them, two hundred additional film and television acting credits came after The Sting (released when Durning was forty-five), resulting in back-to-back Oscar nominations in 1982 and ’83 for Best Supporting Actor in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (the same year he appeared in Tootsie), and for Mel Brooks’s remake of To Be or Not To Be. But I think my personal favorite Durning performance is in the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon. There’s something so real about his playing of the cop in that, both in the comedy and the pathos he brings to the role. All the actors in that picture are incredible, but there’s something about Durning’s work that has stuck with me for the past fifty-one years.

I was fortunate to see him on stage in a number of great shows, though I missed the one for which he won the Tony: the 1990 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. When he received the award for his playing Big Daddy, Durning took the stage and memorably quoted a line attributed to the comedian Jack Benny: “I may not deserve this honor, but I don’t deserve arthritis either. And I have that!” It brought the house down.

Upon his death in 2012, triple Purple Heart holder and Silver Star recipient Charles Durning, was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, first established during the Civil War as a place to honor those who served in wartime. He was a great actor, but he was also someone for whom all the great things that came to him, came out of pure hard work and determination. The final story (and image) comes from Durning himself, who liked to tell it often: “I was at Burt Reynolds’s house once, and Fred Astaire shows up. He says to Burt, ‘Which one is Charles Durning?’ And he pointed me out, and Fred says, ‘I hear you’re teaching at my school, let me see what you’ve got.’ So I danced with him. He led me and I led him, and he patted me on the shoulder. Really nice man.”

One final Durning quote, delivered in his acceptance speech upon receiving the 63rd annual Drama League Award for distinguished performance for a revival of The Gin Game (1997). At its conclusion, he finished up with a piece of advice on a life in the theatre:

“Don’t keep your wallet in the dressing room.”

Ron Fassler is the author of The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and “Theatre Yesterday and Today”columns when they break, please subscribe.