Oscar-winning actor Ernest Borgnine dies of renal failure at 95

London: Ernest Borgnine, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor who starred alongside Frank Sinatra in the early 1950s, died of renal failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 95.

In the early 1950, the lifetime achievement honouree, gained notoriety for playing Fatso Judson, the villain who beat Frank Sinatra to death in ‘From Here to Eternity’. He later starred in 1950s action blockbusters ‘Three Bad Men’, ‘Barabbas’, ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’. After numerous Hollywood successes, he moved into television comedy taking a role in McHale’s Navy as the commander of a World War II PT boat with a crew of misfits and malcontents. “The Oscar made me a star, and I’m grateful,” the Telegraph quoted him as telling an interviewer in 1966. “But I feel had I not won the Oscar I wouldn’t have gotten into the messes I did in my personal life,” he had said. Those messes included four failed marriages, including one in 1964 to singer Ethel Merman that lasted less than six weeks. However, Borgnine’s fifth marriage to Norwegian-born Tova Traesnaes in 1973 endured and brought with it an interesting business partnership. She manufactured and sold her own beauty products under the name of Tova and used her husband’s rejuvenated face in her ads. ANI