Hingle broke into movies with a bit part as a bartender in the 1954 classic On The Waterfront (starring Marlon Brando), then became a regular on Broadway and a familiar face, if not a star, in movies and television. A reliable character actor who has appeared in dozens of roles, Hingle looks like he was born to play a mean judge or perhaps an Irish cop. Indeed he may be best recognized for playing police commissioner Jim Gordon in the big-budget Batman film series (1989-97). In 2002 he was a regular cast member of ABC TV's series The Court.
Hingle served in the Navy in both WWII and the Korean War.
Burly character actor Pat Hingle held down a variety of bread-and-butter jobs--mostly in the construction field--while studying at the University of Texas, the Hagen-Bergdorf studio, the Theatre Wing and the Actors Studio. Earning his Equity card in 1950, Hingle made his Broadway debut in 1953 as Harold Koble in End as a Man (he would repeat this role in the 1957 film adaptation, retitled The Strange One). One year later, he was cast as Gooper-aka "Brother Man"-in Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Also in 1954, he made his inaugural film appearance in On the Waterfront as a bartender. Though a familiar Broadway presence and a prolific TV actor, Hingle remained a relatively unknown film quantity, so much so that he was ballyhooed as one of the "eight new stars" in the 1957 release No Down Payment. As busy as he was before the cameras in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Hingle's first love was the theatre, where he starred in such productions as William Inge's Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Archibald MacLeish's JB, and later appeared in the one-man show Thomas Edison: Reflections of a Genius. His made-for-TV assignments include such historical personages as Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis (1979), Sam Rayburn in LBJ: The Early Years (1988), J. Edgar Hoover in Citizen Cohn (1992) and Earl Warren in Simple Justice (1993). Among his more recent big-screen assignments has been Commissioner Gordon in the Batman films. Amidst his hundreds of TV guest shots, Pat Hingle has played the regular roles of Chief Paulton in Stone (1980) and Henry Cobb in Blue Skies (1988), was briefly a replacement for Doc (Milburn Stone) on the vintage western Gunsmoke, and has shown up sporadically as the globe-trotting father of Tim Daly and Steven Weber on the evergreen sitcom Wings. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Hingle was born Martin Patterson Hingle in Denver, Colorado to Marvin Louise
(née Patterson), a schoolteacher and musician, and Clarence Martin Hingle, a
building contractor.[1] Hingle enlisted in the U.S. Navy in
December 1941, dropping out of the University of Texas. He served on the destroyer USS Marshall during WWII.
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