Book Review: Ernie, the Autobiography/Ernest Borgnine (2008)

Now well over 90 years old, Ernest Borgnine is known to different generations for his role as the villain in From Here to Eternity, as Commander Quinton McHale from McHale's Navy, and as a voice regular on Spongebob Squarepants.

He's acted with the best-known in the industry and remembers his experiences with fondness and appreciation in this account of the the career his mother suggested after he finished ten years service in the U.S. Navy.

Some early stage work, a couple stints on Broadway, a few minor movies, and Borgnine wound up killing off Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity with James Jones delightedly telling him he was the villain he visualized in his book.

Later, he picked up an Oscar for Marty but although he continued working, it was his only real star role, which he remarked on when talking about his friendship with another Oscar winner who never made the star cut, Cliff Robertson, who got his statuette for Charly. But Borgnine kept working and racked up some great character roles through the decades.

Especially welcome in this fast-reading book are his snapshot recollections movie-by-movie, with expanded chapters on such special projects as McHale's Navy and Poseidon Adventure, and of course, aspects of his personal life including friends and wives. He shares off-camera anecdotes from the various movies and TV shows he shot with Spencer Tracy, Sam Peckinpah, William Holder, William Shatner, Frank Sinatra, Jack Elam, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, frequent co-star Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen, Emperor of the North), Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Montgomery Clift, Raquel Welch, Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Jan Michael Vincent his co-star from TV's Airwolf, Wally Cox who used to ride motorcycles with his buddy Marlon Brando, and others.