Jack Warden spent five decades playing judges, coaches, cops, and gruff company men, without ever quite becoming a star. He learned to take a punch, and throw one, well before Hollywood found him, in a boxing ring in Louisville, Kentucky, under a name that was not his own. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won an Emmy. Yet the role most people still recognize him for was a supporting part in a low-budget drama shot almost entirely in one room.
Louisville, DuPont Manual, and the Ring
Warden was born John Warden Lebzelter Jr. on September 18, 1920, in Newark, New Jersey, but he grew up here, in Louisville. His father, John Warden Lebzelter, was an engineer and technician of Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish descent. His mother, Laura Costello, was Irish.
At seventeen, he was expelled from DuPont Manual High School for repeated fighting. He turned that habit into a paycheck, boxing as a professional welterweight under the name Johnny Costello, his mother’s maiden name. He fought thirteen bouts in the Louisville area, and the purses were small.
Between fights, he worked as a nightclub bouncer, a lifeguard, and a deckhand on a tugboat. In 1938, he enlisted in the Navy and spent three years with the Yangtze Patrol in China.
A Broken Leg, a Play, and a New Direction
Warden left the Navy in 1941 and joined the Merchant Marine, working the engine room of a freighter on convoy runs to Europe. He found the German bombing runs unnerving from below deck, asked for a different assignment, was refused, and quit.
In 1942, he enlisted in the Army instead, training as a paratrooper with the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, during a nighttime practice jump in England, his parachute failed to open properly and he shattered his leg landing in a tree. Many of the friends he trained with died in the invasion he missed.
He spent close to a year in an Army hospital while his leg healed around a steel plate. A friend gave him a play by Clifford Odets to read, and he later called that hospital stay the turning point in his life. He recovered in time to rejoin his unit for the Battle of the Bulge before the war ended.
They sent me back to the States. I was in a hospital for nearly a year.
Jack Warden, in a 1988 Associated Press interview
From the G.I. Bill to Broadway
After his discharge, Warden moved to New York City and studied acting on the G.I. Bill. In 1946, he joined Theatre ’47, a Dallas theater company run by the producer Margo Jones, and spent the next several years performing on its stage.
He made his television debut in 1948 on the anthology series The Philco Television Playhouse, then went on to appear in other live drama anthologies, including Studio One. From 1952 to 1955, he played a gym teacher opposite Wally Cox on the sitcom Mister Peepers.
Broadway followed the same thread. In 1952, he appeared in a revival of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, work by the same playwright who had turned him toward acting in the first place. Three years later, Arthur Miller cast him as Marco, an Italian immigrant seeking a new life in Brooklyn, in the original Broadway production of A View from the Bridge.
12 Angry Men and Hollywood’s Most Reliable Character Actor
Warden’s film career built slowly. He had small, uncredited parts in The Asphalt Jungle and Sunset Boulevard, both released in 1950, then a credited role in 1951’s The Man with My Face. In 1953, he played Corporal Buckley in From Here to Eternity, a Best Picture winner that also helped launch several of his co-stars.
By 1957, Warden was a fixture of American film. He appeared in three notable dramas that year: Edge of the City, The Bachelor Party, and 12 Angry Men. The last of the three was Sidney Lumet’s jury-room drama. Warden played Juror No. 7, a salesman more interested in getting to a baseball game than in the murder trial in front of him. He held his own alongside Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, and the rest of the ensemble, and it became the role most audiences still associate with him.
Television kept him just as busy. Through the early 1960s, he made guest appearances on The Twilight Zone, Naked City, Route 66, and The Fugitive. He starred in his own series, The Wackiest Ship in the Army, from 1965 to 1966, then played Lieutenant Mike Haines on the police drama N.Y.P.D. from 1967 to 1969.
Brian’s Song, Two Oscar Nominations, and All the President’s Men
In 1971, Warden won a supporting-actor Emmy for playing Chicago Bears coach George Halas in the television movie Brian’s Song. It told the real story of Bears running back Brian Piccolo’s friendship with Gale Sayers, as Piccolo faced terminal cancer.
Then came the run of films that defined his later career. He played a wealthy, oblivious businessman in Shampoo (1975), which brought him his first Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA nomination. The following year, he played Harry Rosenfeld, the real Washington Post managing editor, in All the President’s Men, opposite Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the reporters covering Watergate. In 1978, he earned a second Oscar nomination as Max Corkle, a good-hearted, easily flustered trainer, in the comedy Heaven Can Wait.
He closed out the decade with two more sharp turns. He played an unhinged, gun-toting judge in …And Justice for All (1979), then the President of the United States in Being There (1979), Hal Ashby’s satire starring Peter Sellers.
The red haired, stocky character actor who specialized in gruff but sympathetic characters.
Michael T. Toole, Turner Classic Movies, 2006
Character Work Into the 1990s, and a Final Bow
Warden kept working steadily through the 1980s and 1990s, moving easily between comedy and drama. He played dual roles in the comedy Used Cars (1980), then a cynical, ethical mentor to Paul Newman’s washed-up lawyer in The Verdict (1982). From 1984 to 1986, he starred as a private investigator on the CBS comedy Crazy Like a Fox, earning two more Emmy nominations.
He appeared in three Woody Allen films: September (1987), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and Mighty Aphrodite (1995). He also turned up in more mainstream work, including Problem Child (1990) and its sequel, and as Saul, a family friend, in While You Were Sleeping (1995). His last big roles came in Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) and the football comedy The Replacements (2000), his final film.
Everyone who worked closely with Warden said the same thing: the tough guy on screen was nothing like the man himself.
Very gentle. Very dapper. Most of them are pretty true to the characters that they play. He was one who was not.
Sidney Pazoff, Warden’s longtime business manager, to CBS News, 2006
Warden retired from acting after The Replacements. He died on July 19, 2006, of heart and kidney failure, at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85. He was survived by his longtime companion, Marucha Hinds; his son, Christopher; and two grandchildren. His estranged wife, the French actress Vanda Dupre, had married him in 1958. They never formally divorced.
Another Louisville-raised character actor whose career ran on a similarly steady track of gruff, recognizable supporting roles.
A fellow Louisville native and character actor, with a filmography just as long and just as recognizable.
Warden’s place among the city’s long list of actors, athletes, and public figures.
Sources and further reading
Jack Warden, Wikipedia
Jack Warden (1920-2006), Turner Classic Movies
Actor Jack Warden Dies At 85, CBS News
Warden, Jack, Newsmakers 2007 Cumulation, via Encyclopedia.com