Richard Jaeckel

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Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 – June 14, 1997) was an American actor of film and television.

Jaeckel was born in Long Beach, New York. A short, but tough guy, he played a variety of characters in his fifty years and became one of Hollywood's best known character actors. Jaeckel got his start in the business at the age of seventeen while working as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox studios in Hollywood. A casting director auditioned him for a key role in the 1943 film Guadalcanal Diary, Jaeckel won the role and settled into a lengthy career in supporting parts.

He served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1949, then starred in two of the most remembered war films of 1949, Battleground and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. He also played the role of Turk, the daughter's boyfriend, in the celebrated 1952 film Come Back, Little Sheba, co-starring with Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, and Terry Moore. He played Lee Marvin's able second-in-command in The Dirty Dozen for director Robert Aldrich. Jaeckel appeared in several other Aldrich films, including Attack, Ulzana's Raid and Twilight's Last Gleaming.

He appeared in many television programs, including the syndicated drama of the American Civil War, Gray Ghost. In 1954, he appeared as Billy the Kid in an episode of the syndicated western, Stories of the Century, with Jim Davis as the fictitious Southwestern Railroad detective Matt Clark.

In 1971, Jaeckel received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sometimes a Great Notion. He had a recurring role in the short-lived Andy Griffith vehicle Salvage 1. In 1977, Jaeckel appeared with Donna Mills, Bill Bixby, and William Shatner in the last episode, entitled "The Scarlet Ribbon", of NBC's western series The Oregon Trail, starring Rod Taylor and Andrew Stevens.

In his later years, Jaeckel was known to TV audiences as Lt. Ben Edwards on the NBC series Baywatch. He also co-starred on Robert Urich's ABC series Spenser: For Hire in the role of Lieutenant Martin Quirk.

Jaeckel died at the age of seventy after a three-year battle with melanoma, at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. His son, Barry, is a professional golfer who has won on the PGA Tour.

Selected filmography

• Guadalcanal Diary (1943)
• Battleground (1949)
• Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
• The Gunfighter (1950)
• Come Back, Little Sheba (1952)
• The Violent Men (1955)
• Apache Ambush (1955)
• 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
• The Gallant Hours (1960)
• Town Without Pity (1961)
• Once Before I Die (1965)
• The Dirty Dozen (1967)
• The Green Slime (1968)
• The Devil's Brigade (1968)
• Latitude Zero (1969)
• Chisum (1970)
• Sometimes a Great Notion (1971)
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
• The Outfit (1973)
• The Drowning Pool (1975)
• Walking Tall Part 2 (1975)
• Grizzly (1976)
• Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976)
• Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)
• Herbie Goes Bananas (1980)
• Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)
• Cold River (1982)
• Starman (1984)
• Black Moon Rising (1986)
• Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990)
• The King of the Kickboxers (1991)
• Martial Outlaw (1993)

External links

• Richard Jaeckel at the Internet Movie Database
• Richard Jaeckel at Find a Grave

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