“I’ve seen people die, but never go from alive to dead that quickly,” he said...posted by koeselitz at 5:59 AM on January 31, 2010 [5 favorites]
He asked [Lawrence] Olivier, when he was on his deathbed, “‘What are the greatest attributes for an actor to have?’ Larry said, ‘You mean besides eyes and teeth?’” Mr. Torn laughed a tearful laugh. “He said, ‘Physical strength.’” ...
“But with all the stories and everything like that, there’s nothing in my union, and there’s nothing in law enforcement; they checked me out for three months, the F.B.I., absolutely nothing! I have a clean record!” ...
Around two years ago, he said, he was up at one of his local haunts around Lakeville, having a martini. “I was just making a joke, I’m not gonna say what it was,” he said. “But it was a funny joke in Hollywood; the guy took it the wrong way, and said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ There were three of them. He hit me while I was being held, and I had a job, and I couldn’t fight him, I was gonna be on camera the next week, and he held my head down, and they held me and—I got the doctor; you can talk to him—broke one of my ribs in my chest.
“It was right there in a public restaurant, and the owner knows that made my reputation that night -- because I didn’t call the people, and I didn’t sue anybody!”
What did he do? “They let go of me, and they thought I’d go, ‘Ba, ba, ba,’ right down on the ground. And they’d taken my car keys and everything, and so he said, ‘We’ll drive you home now.’ And I said, ‘What, to finish the job? No thanks!’
“They said, ‘What are you going to do now?’ And I said, ‘Watch!’ And I took the keys away from them, the way I disarmed that guy with the knife... I took my keys and ran like a deer out the door and went and got a boulder, and I said, ‘Why don’t you come out here now, you asshole sons of bitches!’”
The next day Mr. Torn could hardly move, but he got to work on time.
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posted by stinkycheese at 12:48 AM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]