#Charles durning santa claus movie#
#Charles durning santa claus series#

Two years later, he earned considerable praise for playing a Brooklyn cop who negotiates with Al Pacino's bank robber in the classic crime thriller 'Dog Day Afternoon' (1975). After working as a nightclub dancer and instructor, the WWII veteran broke into acting in the 1960s on the New York stage, which lead to him being discovered by director George Roy Hill and cast as a corrupt cop who harasses Robert Redford in 'The Sting' (1973).

#Charles durning santa claus series#

His other acting credits included roles in “The Sting,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Tootsie,” “Dick Tracy,” “North Dallas Forty,” and the TV series “Evening Shade.” He also played Santa Claus multiple times.A veteran character actor who was a widely recognizable face in film and on television for over five decades, Charles Durning earned his place as a dependable presence often playing pugnacious tough guys and authority figures.

#Charles durning santa claus movie#

His TV roles included a variety of authority figures, including Pope John XXIII in a 1987 TV movie and Russell Oswald, chief of New York’s prison system, in the TV movie “Attica” (1980).ĭurning, a combat veteran of World War II, died of natural causes, The Associated Press reported. His performance in “Best Little Whorehouse” brought him one of his two Academy Award nominations for supporting actor, along with the one for his role as a Nazi colonel in occupied Poland in Mel Brooks’s remake of “To Be or Not to Be” (1983). senator in “The Final Countdown” (1980), a mayor in “State and Main” (2000), and a congressman in “Naked Run” (2011).

Among the other movie roles are a variety of elected officials: governors in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982) and “O Brother, Where Are Thou?” (2000), a U.S. Burt Lancaster starred as a renegade general who takes over a missile silo in Montana to blackmail the president into revealing the truth about the Vietnam War.ĭurning has 110 movie credits listed by the Internet Movie Database and an additional 94 on television. Stevens in “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” a 1977 political thriller from director Robert Aldrich. The highly touted CBS series debuted in January 2002 but vanished before summer.Īmong Durning’s movie credits was a notable one as president of the United States he played President David T. Cast alongside Joe Mantegna and James Garner, he played a hard-line conservative justice who sometimes spoke in limericks. The most notable of those roles may have been as the Kennedy patriarch, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, in a 1990 ABC miniseries, “The Kennedys of Massachusetts.” The TV miniseries, which chronicled the lives and loves of the Kennedys over several decades, earned Durning a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor, his only Golden Globe.ĭurning also was one of the stars of a short-lived TV series called “First Monday” about the U.S. Blessed with a commanding presence on stage, screen or TV, Durning often used his remarkable versatility to play political leaders.