By Charles Meadows
He boasts one of the longest resumes in Hollywood, and well he should — at 90 years old, Ernest Borgnine hasn’t tired of working and this month adds another title to the list. In Hallmark Channel‘s A Grandpa for Christmas (premiering Nov. 24), the Academy Award winner plays Bert, an octogenarian who takes in the 9-year-old granddaughter he’s never met when her mother — from whom Bert has been estranged — is injured in a car accident. And just like a doting grandfather would, Borgnine has nothing but praise for his young costar, Juliette Goglia, who shines brightly in her role as Becca. “I had a ball,” he says. “I felt like going home and getting my Oscar and giving it to her. … She is good.”
That Academy Award for Best Actor, which he won in 1956 for his role in Marty, has led Borgnine to more screen and TV roles than he ever thought he’d get to play. The list of projects he’s worked on is staggering, as is the variety of talent he’s worked with through the years and the overall wealth of his experience, which goes back to the old Hollywood contract days — a time for which Borgnine doesn’t exactly pine. “I was under contract one time to Hecht/Lancaster — Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster,” he recalls of the period just after winning his Oscar. “I lasted about four or five months, and I found out that they were selling me down the road in order for them to get scripts, in order for them to find directors — they were taking advantage of my success. I thanked them because they gave me the part, but they were throwing anything and everything at me, and I was getting $37,500 a picture. … They threw a picture at me — I think I had about 15 lines in the whole thing. And I’d just won an Academy Award! And believe me, I had to get the script from the head waiter at 21 in New York!”
It wasn’t the best way for Borgnine to be living life as a Hollywood actor. But getting where he needed to be wasn’t easy — and it was downright expensive. “It cost me a cool half million dollars to get out of my contract,” he says. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $4 million.) Unfortunately, even with a free hand and a lifetime of impressive credits, he still has a story about the one that got away. “I always wanted to do one thing. I wanted to play Pancho Villa,” Borgnine says with a touch of regret. “I wanted to play him the way that he really was.” A few years before Marty, he’d nearly had his chance when auditioning for director Elia Kazan. “He was making a picture with Marlon Brando called ¡Viva Zapata! — and there was a part there for Pancho Villa. I took this script home, and I saw it, my eyes opened up and I said, ‘Oh, my God. I’m going to ask him if I can read Pancho Villa. Maybe he hasn’t cast it.’ So the next morning, I went in and I said, ‘Can I read Pancho Villa for you?’ … So I read this for him, and I gave him all of the ‘Ho hos’ and the ‘Ha has.’ And he slammed the script down, and said, ‘All right, now read me the goll-danged landowner.’ He’d already cast it, and he’d made a mistake. He would have liked to have had me, I think.”
Time has helped him get over his missed chance at playing the bandit, but it hasn’t curbed his appetite for what he wants most in life as we reenter the holiday season: “Peace,” he declares. “Peace on this Earth. I think we’re about ready for it, and if it happens in my lifetime, I’d sure like to see it before I leave, because we need it so much.”
