Actor Richard Jaeckel was #BornOnThisDay, Oct. 10, 1926.His film & TV roles spanned 6 decades, with over 100 TV episodes to his credit, not including his ongoing film work.Passed in 1997 (age 70) from #cancer. #RIP #GoneButNotForgotten #GoneButNeverForgotten #BOTD #birthday #hunk

Richard Jaeckel


Jaeckel in the trailer for The Devil's Brigade (1968)

Born: R. Hanley Jaeckel; October 10, 1926; Long Beach, New York, U.S.
Died: June 14, 1997; (aged 70); Woodland Hills, California, U.S.

Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 – June 14, 1997) was an American actor of film and television. Jaeckel became a well-known character actor in his career, which spanned six decades. He received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in the 1971 adaptation of Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.

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Career

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He served in the United States Merchant Marine from 1944 to 1949, then starred in two of the most remembered war films of 1949: Battleground and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. One of Jaeckel's shortest film roles was in The Gunfighter, in which his character is killed by Gregory Peck's character in the opening scene. He played the role of Turk, the roomer's boyfriend, in the Academy Award-winning 1952 film Come Back, Little Sheba, with Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, and Terry Moore. In 1960, he appeared as Angus Pierce in the western, Flaming Star, starring Elvis Presley. He played Lee Marvin's able second-in-command, Sgt. Bowren, in the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen for director Robert Aldrich, and reprised the role in the 1985 sequel, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission. Jaeckel appeared in several other Aldrich films, including Attack (1956), Ulzana's Raid (1972), and Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977).

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The later films in his career included a major role in John Carpenter's 1984 film Starman as an NSA agent hunting an alien life form played by Jeff Bridges as well as in the action films Black Moon Rising with Tommy Lee Jones and Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection with Chuck Norris. In his later years, Jaeckel was known to television audiences as Lt. Ben Edwards on the NBC series Baywatch. He also co-starred on Robert Urich's ABC series Spenser: For Hire in the role of Lieutenant Martin Quirk.

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