Pat Hingle, a versatile character actor of stage and screen who became accustomed to winning critical praise in a career that spanned five decades, died on Saturday at his home in Carolina Beach, N.C. He was 84. The cause was myelodysplasia, a blood disorder, his wife, Julia, said.
Mr. Hingle first attracted the attention of critics in 1953 when he appeared on Broadway in “End as a Man” as a genial but loutish football player caught up in murky doings at a military academy in the South. Walter Kerr, reviewing the play for The New York Herald Tribune called Mr. Hingle's performance “first rate.” When the play, by Calder Willingham, was made into a film called “The Strange One” in 1957, Mr. Hingle got the same role and similar notices.
Over the years, he took on a dizzying mix of roles and seemed to do them all with ease and considerable skill. In the 1960s, he played both Hector in “Troilus and Cressida” and Macbeth at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn. He also played the gruff and messy Oscar in “The Odd Couple” on Broadway.
He played a sprightly Benjamin Franklin in the 1997 Broadway revival of “1776”; a gay J. Edgar Hoover in the 1992 HBO movie “Citizen Cohn”; and Warren Beatty's father in the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass.”
He could be a relatively benign character, like the harness salesman in William Inge's “Dark at the Top of the Stairs” on Broadway, or a quite sinister one, like the sadistic gangster who stubbed out his cigar on Anjelica Huston's hand in the 1990 film “The Grifters.” On the other side of the law he was Police Commissioner Gordon in Batman movies, beginning in 1989.
“I can be a truck driver, a doctor, a lawyer, a hanging judge, whatever,” he said in an interview. “And looking like I do has allowed me to make a good living in all kinds of media. It's a blessing and I'm aware of it.”
Mr. Hingle, a husky six-footer, did have an imposing physical presence, but his abilities were probably enhanced by the jobs he had while trying to break into show business — shoe salesman, playground attendant, rather unsuccessful purveyor of Bibles, farmhand, usher, waiter and even file clerk at Bloomingdale's.
Martin Patterson Hingle was born on July 19, 1924, in Miami. His father was a building contractor who died when his son was an infant; his widow took her three children all over the country as she worked at menial jobs.
Mr. Hingle went to high school in Weslaco, Tex., where he played tuba in the band. He attended the University of Texas, but dropped out during World War II to enlist in the Navy. He served as a fireman aboard a destroyer that saw action in the South Pacific. He liked the ship, later telling interviewers that it was his “first real home anywhere.”
In 1946, following his discharge, he returned to the University of Texas and joined a drama club because, he said, that's where the prettiest girls were. He received a bachelor's degree in 1949. When the war in Korea began he was recalled by the Navy, serving as a boilerman technician.
He came to New York in 1952, joined the Actors Studio and began to get parts both onstage and in films. His early movies included “On the Waterfront” (1954) and “No Down Payment” (1957).
During the 1954-55 Broadway season, he played Gooper in Tennessee Williams's “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” When he appeared in “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” in 1957, Richard Watts wrote in The New York Post that Mr. Hingle “possesses a dynamic quality that brings everything to life.”
He got the title role of a morally aware businessman in the Archibald MacLeish play “J.B.” in 1958, and Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times said the actor gave “an almost unbearably moving performance of a man of fortitude who is almost overwhelmed but never yields to the evil of his time.”
The play, which was directed by Elia Kazan, was still running in 1959 when Mr. Hingle, trying to escape a stalled elevator in his apartment building on the West Side, fell more than 50 feet down the shaft. He fractured his left hip and a finger had to be amputated. He spent a year convalescing.
Mr. Hingle said he preferred theater because movies “are not the actor's medium.” ”
After the war, he married Alyce F. Dorsey; the marriage ended in divorce. Their three children, Bill Hingle, Jody Smith and Molly Mantione survive him, as do his wife, Julia; two stepchildren, Katherine Joy and Gregory Swanson; two sisters, Jamie Petty and Joyce France; and 11 grandchildren.
Mr. Hingle was a self-described workaholic, and over the years he took so many roles that he said he forgot details about some of the characters. He'd watch his old movies on television “with fascination,” he said, because he could never remember “whether I'm a good guy or a bad guy.”
Da The New York Times, 5 gennaio 2009
