Vintage Hunk: Aldo Ray

Aldo Ray is pretty much forgotten today but in the 1950s he was one of the hunkiest, most masculine actors working in films. With his raspy voice and hairy, barrel chest, Ray was the prototype of the American male during the Eisenhower years.

Originally named Aldo DaRe, the future actor was born in Pennsylvania to an Italian family of five brothers and one sister. In 1944, at the age of 18, he entered the Navy serving as a frogman until 1946. Afterwards, DaRe entered the University of California, Berkeley. He quickly married, left school, and relocated to the Northern California town of Crockett. The couple had a daughter and DaRe was elected the Constable of Crockett.
Life changed when DaRe drove his brother to an audition for the baseball film Saturday's Hero. Director David Miller (Sudden Fear and Back Street) spotted and hired him for a small role in the film. It was DaRe's deep raspy voice that got him the job. Columbia Pictures, under the tyrannical Harry Cohn, signed him to a contract and simplified his name to Aldo Ray.
Ray's first starring role was opposite Judy Holliday in George Cukor's masterpiece The Marrying Kind.  Ray never gave a better performance or appeared in a finer film. This comedy/drama written by longtime Cukor friends Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin was the bittersweet story of a married couple who appear before a divorce judge as their relationship— including their courtship and loss of their child— is told in flashbacks. Holliday was brilliant and Ray was both sexy and touching as the husband.
This film was followed by another Cukor gem Pat and Mike with Hepburn and Tracy. Ray played a boxer and he was never sexier on screen. He received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Newcomer. At this point Cohn wanted Ray to play the doomed soldier in From Here to Eternity, but director Fred Zinnemann insisted that Montgomery Clift be cast. As Ray was the polar opposite physically and spiritually of Clift, it is interesting to speculate what he would have done with the role.
The next few years were great for Ray. He co-starred with Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson, appeared in the smash hit Battle Cry and did a wonderful change-of-pace comedy We're No Angels with Humphrey Bogart and Joan Bennett. But 1958 was the best year in Ray's career as he starred in both The Naked and the Dead and God's Little Acre. Based on Erskine Caldwell famously sexy novel, God's Little Acre introduced Tina Louise (who later played Ginger on Gilligan's Island) and she and Ray had some torrid scenes together.
Unfortunately, the following decade saw Ray's career decline considerably. His brand of masculinity was past and he was getting heavier and older. His best role of the '60s was in the atrocious John Wayne pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets. This rotten 3-hour epic was Wayne's answer to those protesting the war at home, but the film ends with one of the most grotesque scenes in movie history. When the the little war orphan Ham Chuck (I kid you not) asks, "What will happen to me now?" Wayne puts a green beret on him and says, "You let me worry about that, Green Beret. You're what this thing's all about." Wayne and the little tyke then walk away, holding hands, into the sunset. This scene in probably one of the Right Wing's most hilariously bad movie scenes. In spite of this, Ray gave a good performance, but he looked older and it was clear that his leading man days were over.
Ray's last years were unkind. His three marriages ended in divorce and he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Returning to Crockett, he died in 1991 at the age of 64.
Aldo Ray is still Crockett's favorite son, and for moviegoers of a certain age he was a sexy, masculine stud whose movie career would always be highlighted by the divine The Marrying Kind.