Lawrence Tierney was an average actor who became a cult ''tough guy'' thanks to his inspired casting in a couple of key movies - made nearly 50 years apart - and to his reputation for heavy drinking and getting arrested. The square-jawed, often inscrutable-looking actor first made an impression on audiences in the superior 1945 B movie Dillinger, a loose biopic of the 1920s gangster, and became a cult figure to a whole new generation of moviegoers when Quentin Tarantino cast him as the gang leader in Reservoir Dogs (1992).
The son of an Irish policeman, Tierney was born in Brooklyn in 1919. (His brother, Scott Brady, also became an actor, specialising in westerns.)
A star athlete at school, he received an athletic scholarship to Manhattan College, but he dropped out two years into his studies to start earning a living. After a succession of jobs, he was working as a model for the mail order catalogue Sears-Roebuck when an acting coach suggested he try his hand at drama.
Tierney joined a theatre group, and in 1943, when he was a member of the American-Irish Theatre, he was spotted by a talent scout from RKO and put under contract.
After just two years in Hollywood's B-movies, Tierney made his breakthrough performance in a film for which he was loaned out to another studio - the ''Poverty Row'' studio Monogram. Its biopic of the hoodlum John Dillinger may have dispensed with period detail and relied on footage from a Fritz Lang film for its key action sequence, but it emerged as a particularly exciting thriller, with Tierney an especially menacing tough guy.
Dillinger did extraordinarily well by B-movie standards, not least because it was controversial: it was banned in Chicago and other cities where its subject
had operated. Now aware of Tierney's potential as a tough guy, RKO kept him busy. Among his best films was Born to Kill (also known as Lady of Deceit), a now-cult 1947 film noir in which Tierney played a psychotic, easily riled, killer who is attracted to the upper-class, though hard-boiled, divorcee Claire Trevor, but marries her wealthier sister.
As one of his first victims says, admiringly, early in the film, Tierney's character is the ''quiet sort- and yet you get a feeling that if you stepped out of line, he'd kick your teeth down
your throat''.
Tierney played similar characters in a string of B-movies over the next 10 years, and would almost certainly have graduated to A-features had it not been for his off-screen reputation: his turbulent private life and violent personality inevitably cost him many opportunities.
When, in 1985, the great, maverick director John Huston called to ask him to appear in Prizzi's Honor, his black comedy about the Mob, he told Tierney that he had always wanted to work with him and had considered him for many films, including The Asphalt Jungle. By 1950, when The Asphalt Jungle, was made, Tierney's frequent arrests for bar-room brawls, drunk driving, and disorderly conduct were making him an undesirable person to have on board any film, even a
B-movie.
He was on the verge of landing a contract with Paramount - on the personal recommendation of none other than the veteran director Cecil B DeMille, in whose drama The Greatest Show on Earth he had had a small role - when he was arrested for yet another bar room punch-up.
The contract fell through. By 1955, as one newspaper noted, Tierney had been arrested 16 times - more often than Dillinger. The work gradually dried up, and Tierney appeared only occasionally on screen.
He spent several years in France in the 1960s, and kept the police busy there, before returning to the States to the occasional small role and headlines which still referred to him as ''Movie Dillinger''.
In 1973, he was in the news because he had been stabbed in the abdomen in a brawl in a New York bar, and two years later another news story reported that he was being questioned about the apparent suicide of a 24-year-old woman.
Tierney's work situation was so bad in the 1970s that he took a series of odd jobs, including driving a horse-drawn cab in Central Park, but he worked regularly in the 1980s, on TV (he was a regular in Hill Street Blues for a time) and in such movies as Murphy's Law (1986) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987).
However, it was his performance in Reservoir Dogs
which revived his profile, and sparked renewed interest in his early career.
Lawrence Tierney, actor; born March 15, 1919, died February 26, 2002.
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