Movie tough guy Lawrence Tierney kept punching off screen

When the producers of Seinfeld wanted a taciturn, intimidating tough guy to play Elaine’s father they hired Lawrence Tierney, who proved just as intimidating in real life

Lawrence Tierney (right) about to beat up Barton McLane in the 1946 film San Quentin.

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When producers of the popular sitcom Seinfeld were looking for an implacable, gruff, tough guy to play Elaine’s father Alton Benes they found a genuine film noir veteran. His name was Lawrence Tierney and he had played dozens of roles as cops, private eyes, gangsters and standover men in the golden age of Hollywood film noir in the 1940s and ’50s.

Tierney was the real deal. He had a head that looked like it had been carved from a block of stone, with a face that had been smacked one too many times. His intimidating steely gaze said “don’t come near”. Dressed in a fedora and a trench coat he looked even more menacing and when he growled his lines at Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander, neither actor needed to act intimidated, they were intimidated.

Julia Louis Dreyfus, who played Elaine, later described Tierney as a “total nutjob”.

On set Tierney never dropped out of character and at one stage picked up a knife and slid it into his jacket. When Seinfeld saw him and asked him what he was doing with the knife Tierney pulled it out and brandished it like Norman Bates from Psycho.

He later claimed he did it as a gag, but no one was laughing, and Tierney, who was originally going to be invited to play Alton in a recurring role, was never asked back.

Lawrence Tierney in the 1948 film Bodyguard.

For Tierney, who was born a century ago today, it was a theme that dogged his career. On screen he played some hard-bitten characters, but despite his protests that he was really a “nice guy” he was often in fights and in trouble with the law. It lost him friends and some film roles but made him the most convincing screen thug.

He was born Lawrence James Tierney in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1919. His father Lawrence Sr was a hard-bitten Irish-American cop, who rose to become chief of police of the New York Aqueduct Guards. Tierney had two younger brothers, Gerald (who later also became an actor under the name Scott Brady) and Edward. All three were excellent sportsmen. Tierney was a track and field star in high school and won a scholarship to Manhattan College. But he dropped out after two years and found work as a labourer on the New York Aqueduct. Even that wasn’t a long-term thing and he quickly moved on to other jobs including doing some modelling for mail order catalogues.

Lawrence Tierney in a publicity still for the 1945 film Dillinger.

According to one story he was standing outside the Black Friars Theatre one night and the manager liked his look and hired him on the spot. In 1943 an RKO talent scout saw him in a production and offered him a film contract. He started out with extra roles and bit parts, mostly uncredited, but in 1945 RKO loaned him out to Monogram Films for their movie Dillinger. He was cast in the title role as gangster John Dillinger. The film was a success and made Tierney a star.

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His early roles were reasonably diverse, but all involved being stoic, tough or intimidating. He played a cop, a soldier, outlaw Jesse James, a reformed ex-con and a cold blooded killer.

It was playing characters such as the psychotic conman Sam Wilde in Born to Kill (1947) that he had his greatest impact.

While his talent for bad guys should have made him a powerful player, he had a drinking problem. The problem was that when he drank he became belligerent. In 1946 alone, he was up five times on drunk and disorderly charges. In 1947 he was sentenced to 70 days’ jail and while out on parole had a drunken fight with his brother that put him back in prison.

Through the 1950s there were several terrible bar brawls. He broke a university student’s jaw in 1951, served time for assault in 1952 and 1953 and his bloodied face was splashed across newspapers after a 1958 bar fight, during which he also turned on the police trying to break it up.

When directors and actors started refusing to work with him he returned to the stage in the late 1950s. He made a handful of films in the ’60s and ’70s, including Bad with Andy Warhol in 1976. But it was in the ’80s and ’90s that he was rediscovered, with a steady stream of character roles in films and on TV. He seemed to be ready to return with a vengeance after his powerful turn as crime boss Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs in 1991, but his tensions with other actors and nearly coming to blows with director Quentin Tarantino made people wary of working with him. The Seinfeld team may not have heard the stories when they hired him to play the father role.

He made his last film in 2000 and died in a nursing home in 2002.