Hollywood’s Men in Black star Rip Torn dies at 88

Emmy winner Rip Torn, whose tempestuous nature made him a compelling character actor on the screen and stage but sometimes caused him trouble on the set and in private life, died on Tuesday at the age of 88, media reports said.

Torn, whose late-career resurgence included a key role on U.S. television’s The Larry Sanders Show and in the movies Men in Black and Dodgeball, died peacefully at his home, his family told the Hollywood Reporter and other media.

The cause was not disclosed, but he was surrounded by his wife, actress Amy Wright, known for Stardust Memories and The Accidental Tourist, and his daughters, media reports said.

Neither his family nor agent were immediately available for comment late Tuesday.

Torn showed great range in his career but with a crooked grin, gruff voice and devilish glint in his eyes, he was especially well suited to playing bad boys and unpredictable characters.

He often made headlines because of his volatility. He blamed his dismissal from a production of ‘Macbeth’ on ‘friends’ of the administration of President Richard Nixon, who Torn would later portray in the television mini-series Blind Ambition

.

Later in life came alcohol-related incidents, including an arrest in 2010 for breaking into a closed bank that he had mistaken for his home in Salisbury, Connecticut.

“I have certain flaws in my makeup. Something called rise-ability,” Torn told writer Studs Terkel for “Working,” a 1974 book about people and their jobs. “I get angry easily. I get saddened by things easily.”

Torn said he went into acting as a way to use those emotions to his benefit.

“Rip has an unabashed masculine drive. You can’t act that,” playwright Horton Foote, who cast Torn in his play “The Young Man From Atlanta” and also worked frequently with Torn’s second wife, Geraldine Page, told the New York Times.

Torn was born in Temple, Texas, on Feb. 6, 1931, and grew up with aspirations of being a farmer before discovering drama at the University of Texas. After graduating, he and first wife Ann Wedgeworth moved to New York in the late 1950s.