R Lee Ermey, a former marine who made a career in acting playing hard-nosed military men like the fearsome Gunnery Sgt Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, has died. Ermey’s manager, Bill Rogin, said he died on Sunday morning from pneumonia-related complications. He was 74.
The Kansas-born actor was nominated for a Golden Globe award for his performance in Full Metal Jacket, in which he uttered memorable lines such as: “What is your major malfunction?” and for which he gained the nickname Gunny.
His co-stars Matthew Modine and Vincent D’Onofrio tweeted their condolences. “#SemperFidelis Always faithful. Always loyal. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Modine wrote, quoting the Dylan Thomas poem. “RIP amigo. PVT. Joker.”
Vincent D’Onofrio wrote: “Ermey was the real deal. The knowledge of him passing brings back wonderful memories of our time together.”
Donald Trump Jr, who was friends with Ermey, paid tribute to the marine and actor on Instagram, calling him “a legend and a great American”.
Born Ronald Lee Ermey in 1944, Ermey served 11 years in the US Marine Corps and spent 14 months in Vietnam and then Okinawa, Japan, where he became a staff sergeant. His first film credit was as a helicopter pilot in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was quickly followed by a part as a drill instructor in The Boys in Company C.
He gained more than 60 credits in film and television, often playing authority figures in everything from Se7en to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.
Ermey was originally employed as a technical consultant for Full Metal Jacket, but he wanted the role of the gunnery sergeant. Ermey said that Kubrick was initially reluctant to give him the part.
“He had seen me in Boys in Company C and told me ‘you’re just not mean enough. You’re too nice’. That was very insulting to me, because I consider myself one of the foulest suckers in the world,” he told NBC interviewer Bobbie Wygant shortly after the film’s release.
However, Ermey later submitted an audition tape of him yelling out insults while tennis balls flew at him. An impressed Kubrick gave him the role.
Kubrick told Rolling Stone that 50% of Ermey’s dialogue in the 1987 film was his own. “In the course of hiring the marine recruits, we interviewed hundreds of guys. We lined them all up and did an improvisation of the first meeting with the drill instructor. They didn’t know what he was going to say, and we could see how they reacted. Lee came up with, I don’t know, 150 pages of insults,” Kubrick said.
Ermey also voiced the army man called Sarge in the Toy Story films; played athletics coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman in Prefontaine; General Kramer in Toy Soldiers, and Mayor Tilman in Mississippi Burning.He was a board member for the National Rifle Association, and a spokesman for Glock.
“He will be greatly missed by all of us,” Rogin said. “It is a terrible loss that nobody was prepared for.”
He described Ermey as a family man, and a kind and gentle soul who supported military personnel.