Actor who won an Oscar for his role as Marty in the 1955 film of the same name had a 60-year career in film and television

Ernest Borgnine, the Italian-American actor who carved out a distinctive screen presence in a range of pugnacious character roles over a 60-year career, has died at the age of 95.

Borgnine won an Oscar for his role as Marty in the 1955 film of the same name, and was a star of the small screen during the 1960s as the scheming Navy officer in the comedy McHale’s Navy. In the 80s, he came to the attention of a new generation of TV viewers as Dominic Santini in the hit series Airwolf.

In other roles, particularly during the earlier years of his career, his stocky build and bulldog appearance made him a natural choice to play the classic Hollywood ‘heavy’ and he was memorable as the sergeant who beats up Frank Sinatra in “From Here to Eternity” and as one of the thugs who menaces Spencer Tracy in “Bad Day at Black Rock.”

He demonstrated his versatility in “Marty,” a low-budget film in which played a butcher who fears he is so unattractive he will never find romance. Then, at a dance, he meets a young woman with the same fear.

“Sooner or later, there comes a point in a man’s life when he’s gotta face some facts,” Marty movingly tells his mother at one point in the film. “And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it. I chased after enough girls in my life. I-I went to enough dances. I got hurt enough. I don’t wanna get hurt no more.”

For his efforts, Borgnine won a best actor Oscar and other awards, including one at Cannes.

After this success, he went on to play another sensitive role, opposite Bette Davis, in The Catered Affair, a film that was a personal favourite and concerned a New York taxi driver and his wife who argued over the expense of their daughter’s wedding.

Producers also continued casting Borgnine in action films such as Three Bad Men, The Vikings, Torpedo Run, Barabbas, The Wild Bunch, and The Dirty Dozen, a box-office success in 1967 in which he teamed up with Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson to portray a second world war commando mission.

It was during the 1960s that he also successfully made the transition to television comedy.

A US navy veteran himself, between 1962 and 1966 he starred in “McHale’s Navy as the commander of a wartime patrol with a crew of misfits and malcontents.

Ermes Efron Borgnino was born in Hamden, Connecticut, on 24 January 1917, the son of Italian immigrant parents. For five years from the age of two, he and his family lived in Milan before returning to the US. He joined the US Navy in 1935 and served on a destroyer during the war. He weighed 135 pounds (61 kilograms) when he enlisted. He left the Navy 10 years later, weighing exactly 100 pounds (45 kilograms) more.

For a time he contemplated taking a job with an air conditioning company but his mother persuaded him to enroll at the Randall School of Dramatic Arts in Hartford, Connecticut. Over the course of four months he received his only formal training.

He continued to act over the course of successive decades, and came to prominence again in Airwolf.

As recently as 2009, he was a guest star in the final series of the hospital drama, ER, and was nominated for an Emmy.

Borgnine, who was married five times, including once to Broadway actress Ethel Merman for only 32 days, died of renal failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre with his wife and children at his side on Sunday.