Re: Non Boating Query: Who is Aldo Ray?
Archetypal 1950s screen tough guy, with a distinctively high-pitched gravel voice, former Navy frogman Ray had no acting experience at all when he won a bit part in Saturday's Hero (1951), and then found himself in demand. He displayed a disarming vulnerability as a man on the verge of divorce in The Marrying Kind a thick-witted sports figure in Pat and Mike (both 1952), and a sympa thetic Marine in Battle Cry (1955). His subsequent roles got tougher and tougher: He was positively brutal as a Korean war dogface in Men in War (1956), a whitetrash drunk in God's Little Acre (1958), and another hard-boiled soldier in The Naked and the Dead (1958). By the time Ray appeared as a drill sergeant in John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), his image was completely fixed. Hit with financial troubles and long since reduced to rock-bottom exploitation movies such as Stud Brown (1975) and The Bad Bunch (1976), Ray in 1982 consented to appear in a hard-core porno film, Sweet Savage (1979) (he did not, however, appear in any sex scenes). He contracted throat cancer in the late 1980s and had to keep working in order to raise money to combat it, taking roles in low-budget thrillers and horror pictures. He succumbed to the illness in 1991, shortly after completing his scenes for The Shooters Ray's son, Eric DaRe, played vicious wife-beater Leo Johnson in the TV series "Twin Peaks" in 1990-91.
