Elmore Rual 'Rip' Torn: A Legendary Actor's Life and Career (1931–2019)

Elmore Rual “Rip” Torn, actor on stage, screen, and television, was born in Temple, Texas, on February 6, 1931, to Elmore Rural “Tiger” Torn, an agronomist and founder of the International Black-Eyed Pea Appreciation Society, and Thelma Mary (Spacek) Torn, who was the sister of Edwin Spacek, father of actress Sissy Spacek. The nickname “Rip” was commonly applied to males on the Torn side of the family. Torn spent his early childhood in Taylor, Texas. By the time of the 1940 U.S. census, the family lived in Longview, where Torn’s father was agriculture director of the East Texas Chamber of Commerce, but the Torn family once again resided in Taylor by the late 1940s. After graduating from Taylor High School in 1948, Torn enrolled at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University) and studied agriculture but later transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied theater under B. Iden Payne, a renowned Shakespeare scholar. At UT-Austin Torn was a member of the Curtain Club and Sigma Chi. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1953, he served as a military policeman in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. After military service, Torn married Ann Wedgeworth, also a UT-Austin student and future actress on January 15, 1955, in Dallas. They had one daughter, Danae, born in 1956, before divorcing in 1961.

With aspirations to be an actor, Torn moved to New York in the mid-1950s. In 1956 he served as an understudy in the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, staged by director Elia Kazan. That same year he made his movie debut with a bit part in Kazan’s Baby Doll. He also had small parts in A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Pork Chop Hill (1959) and appeared in television shows, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Restless Gun. Torn enrolled at the Actors Studio in New York City. Founded by Elia Kazan and later managed by Lee Strasberg, the organization tutored a number of well-known actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Robert Duvall in what was popularly known as method acting. Under the direction of Kazan, Torn played Thomas Finley, Jr., in the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award. He portrayed Judas in the 1961 film King of Kings before reprising his role of Finley in the movie version of Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by Richard Brooks, in 1962. Torn’s role as the surly son of Boss Finley, a small-town overlord, made an impression on critics and audiences and paved the way for future roles, particularly as a “heavy.” Years later he starred in a television movie version of Sweet Bird of Youth (1989) and played Boss Finley, the father of the character he had played three decades earlier on stage and screen.

On September 8, 1963, Torn married actress Geraldine Page, who had starred with him in the play and movie of Sweet Bird of Youth. The “Torn Page” marriage, as they characterized it, lasted until Page died in 1987. They had a daughter, Angelica, and twin sons, Tony and Jon. 

After his success in Sweet Bird of Youth, Torn had supporting roles in The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Beach Red (1967), and Sol Madrid (1968), but he also appeared in independent and underground movies such as Coming Apart (1969) and Tropic of Cancer (1970, in which he played author Henry Miller). He did not get the role of George Hanson, the young attorney in Easy Rider (1969). Texas-born screenwriter Terry Southern wrote the part with Torn in mind, but director Dennis Hopper clashed with Torn and the part went to Jack Nicholson. On The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1994, Hopper said that Torn had pulled a knife on him. Torn sued for defamation and was awarded more than $900,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

As his television and movie credits mounted, Torn continued to perform onstage in New York. In addition to Sweet Bird of Youth, he appeared in the Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie (1975–76). During his career he also acted in plays by Eugene O’Neill (Desire Under the Elms [1963], Strange Interlude [1963], and Anna Christie [1993]), August Strindberg (The Dance of Death [1971]), and Texas playwright Horton Foote (The Young Man from Atlanta [1997]). 

In 1967 he portrayed a pimp in The Deer Park, Norman Mailer’s stage adaptation of his 1955 novel of the same name. This role earned Torn an Obie (off-Broadway) award for his “distinguished performance” and furthered a working relationship with Mailer that had a lasting effect on Torn’s career, particularly after Mailer got into filmmaking in the late 1960s. Of Torn, Mailer commented that he was “not nearly recognized sufficiently for his talent, for the remarkable force of unholy smoldering he could always present….”

Torn had a role (a Hell’s Angel named Popcorn) in Beyond the Law (1968), Mailer’s second feature-length film. He followed up with the role of Raoul Rey O’Houlihan, the half-brother of presidential candidate Norman Kingsley (played by Mailer) in Maidstone. Filmed in East Hampton, Long Island, in the summer of 1968, the film, though fictional, was done in the cinema verité style then popular in documentaries. The film was released in 1970. Maidstone secured Torn a unique niche in cinema history. The storyline featured a recurring theme of candidate Kingsley’s fear of assassination (the film was made soon after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.), and it was implied that an attempt would be made before the movie ended. On the last day of filming, Torn literally took matters into his own hands and assaulted Mailer with a hammer while the cameras were rolling. While Maidstone is rarely seen today, the uncensored scene of the Mailer-Torn fracas has since been watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers on the Internet. Mailer was initially outraged by the attack but later admitted that, given the narrative and its improvisational quasi-documentary filming technique, the assault was a fitting conclusion to the film. Apparently, there were no hard feelings, as Torn had a major role in Barbary Shore (1973–74), the stage adaptation (by Jack Gelber) of Mailer’s 1951 novel.  

While “volatile” was a frequent adjective applied to Torn, he was also lauded as versatile as his career progressed. His movie credits included Payday (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), Cross Creek (1983), and Men in Black (1997). He received his only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, in Cross Creek, in which he played a backwoods Floridian during the Great Depression. He was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor in Freddy Got Fingered (2001), a legendary bad film that was the brainchild of comedian Tom Green. 

Torn was cast in many real-life roles in television movies and mini-series in later years. He played Walt Whitman in an episode of the television series The American Parade in 1976 (and later played him in the film Beautiful Dreamers in 1990). He portrayed Carlo Ponti (Sophia Loren: Her Own Story, 1980), Kit Carson (Dream West, 1986), and three United States presidents (Richard M. Nixon in Blind Ambition, 1979; Ulysses S. Grant in The Blue and the Gray, 1982; and Lyndon B. Johnson in J. Edgar Hoover, 1987).

To the surprise of many moviegoers, Torn began to show a flair for comedy in Summer Rental (1985), and Defending Your Life (1991). This led to a recurring television role as Artie on The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98). Torn was nominated for an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor each season and won the award in 1996. British critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian said, “With a scowl that would occasionally break into a satanic jack-o’-lantern grin, Artie made Rip Torn a titan of U.S. TV comedy.” Torn later appeared in several episodes of the television comedy show 30 Rock (2007–09).

At age seventy-three, Torn essayed one of his most memorable roles in the comedy DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (2004). He played Patches O’Houlihan, a crotchety wheelchair-bound dodgeball coach who expressed displeasure with his players by throwing wrenches at them. In 2004 Torn married actress Amy Engelmann Wright. The couple had two daughters, Katie and Claire. Torn worked steadily and amassed 193 film and television credits, as well as twenty-one official stage credits (seventeen as an actor and four as a director) during his career.

In later years, Torn’s volatility crossed over into his non-professional life. After a history of alcohol abuse and drunken driving episodes, in 2010 he was arrested for breaking into a bank in his hometown of Lakeville, Connecticut. He pled guilty to reckless endangerment, criminal trespass, criminal mischief, and possession of a firearm. He served no jail time but was on probation for three years.

Towards the end of his career, Torn went beyond stage, screen, and television shows and added music videos, commercials, and voice roles in video games and cartoons. He was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame in 2011.

Elmore Rual “Rip” Torn died of complications from Alzheimer’s at his Lakeville, Connecticutt, home on July 9, 2019. He was interred at Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery in Poughkeepsie, New York. At the time of his death his estate was worth approximately $8 million.

In addition to his body of work, Torn’s legacy is reflected by his cousin and actress Sissy Spacek, whom he and Geraldine Page mentored when she graduated from Quitman High School in East Texas and learned the ropes of acting in New York. Another tribute to Torn (and Geraldine Page) is the Torn Page home. Located at 435 W. 22nd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, it has been transformed into a classroom/performance space. Torn was also featured as a subject in Studs Terkel’s best-selling book Working (1974).