Hey kid, listen up.I'm Lawrence Tierney. You call me Larry. Everybody does. I grew up in New York, born March 15th 1919. I was the oldest of three brothers; the other two were Gerard (born 1924, later known as Scott Brady) and Edward (born 1928, later known as Ed Tracy).
I had it tough growing up, believe me - it wasn't easy. For many years I was happy to follow in my father's footsteps, just getting whatever jobs I could -- mostly building work. Eventually though, I had enough and decided to make something of myself. In the early 1940's I broke into movies, playing bit parts, seeing how it all worked. I wasn't noticed until I appeared in "Dillinger" (1945) playing the title character. Up until that point, I'd done some modelling too - but that all changed as soon as I started appearing in movies like "The Devil Thumbs a Ride", and many others where I played dark, psychotic villains. Unfortunately my lifestyle off-screen took a toll on my career, and my parts had already started to thin-out by the 1950's. I used to get into a lot of scraps -- bar-room brawls and all that. It's the drink that caused most of it, but it got me a reputation for being a hellraiser. In '53 I made a huge career mistake, turning down a role in "On The Waterfront", which got Rod Steiger an Oscar nomination. That would have put me back on track for sure. I played a good bad guy in DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" in '52.
The sixties and seventies weren't too kind to me in terms of parts, and I ended up in only a few movies and a handful of TV episodes. The eighties marked a bit of a spark in my career, and I was in some better movies including Gloria (1980), Arthur (1981), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), Murphy's Law (1986) and Naked Gun (1988). It wasn't until I was approaced by Tarantino to appear in his first movie "Reservoir Dogs', that my career was really revived again. Hell, I caused plenty of trouble on set, but the movie did me a world of good!
Lawrence Tierney appeared in many films and TV series through the nineties, and died aged 82, in his sleep on February 26th, 2002.
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