Acting Career
After the war was over, Borgnine returned to his parents' home with no job and no direction. In a British Film Institute interview about his life and career, Borgnine said:
After World War II we wanted no more part in war. I didn't even want to be a boy-scout. I went home and said that I was through with the Navy and so now, what do we do? So I went home to mother, and after a few weeks of patting on the back and, 'You did good,' and everything else, one day she said, 'Well?' like mothers do. Which meant, 'Alright, you gonna get a job or what?'As he was unwilling to settle for a dead-end factory job, his mother encouraged him to pursue a more glamorous profession and suggested that his personality would be well suited for the stage. He surprised his mother by taking the suggestion to heart, although his father was far from enthusiastic. In 2011, Borgnine remembered,
She said, `You always like getting in front of people and making a fool of yourself, why don't you give it a try?' I was sitting at the kitchen table and I saw this light. No kidding. It sounds crazy. And 10 years later, I had Grace Kelly handing me an Academy Award.Read more about this topic: Ernest Borgnine
Famous quotes containing the words acting and/or career:
“Surely, ‘tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him so ... so here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the character ... of generosity and virtue.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)