Lawrence Tierney has frightened me since the first moment I laid eyes on him in the gritty film noir, Born to Kill (1947). I found him unpleasant in that first glimpse. I watched it to see one of my favorite actresses, Claire Trevor, but ended up being uncomfortably riveted by Tierney as her leading man. He seemed to soil everything around him, bringing out the worst in the flinty Ms. Trevor and destroying the innocence of her foster sister, played by Audrey Long. However, he also made his leading lady's grinning fiancee look like a bowl of mayonnaise.

You may want to run from Lawrence Tierney, but he's so magnetic you can't look away. His face is usually still and emotionless, except for an occasionally sharply-creased forehead or flash of the eyes, and yet you sense all the tension bubbling under that stony mask. Tall, handsome and complicated, Tierney was a perfect creature of film noir. It was where he did some of the best work of his five decade career. That undercurrent of darkness made him dangerous, whether he played good, bad or somewhere in between.

Tierney was born in 1919 in Brooklyn, New York to mother Mary and father Lawrence, a policeman. His younger brothers, Scott Brady and Edward Tierney, would both join him in the acting profession one day. As an athletic teenager, he excelled in track and field, winning a scholarship to Manhattan College. School wasn't for him, though. He dropped out and worked as a laborer.

After a period of job hopping, Tierney found work as a catalogue model. Stage work with the American-Irish Theatre and the Black Friars theatre group followed. He was eventually discovered by an RKO talent scout and brought to Hollywood in 1943.

For the next two years, the young actor learned how to act onscreen in a series of supporting roles, many of them uncredited. Some, like his brief appearance as a band leader in The Falcon Out West (1944) are nothing like the dark persona he crafted in noir. Others, like a brief, but striking role as an irreverent seaman in Val Lewton's deliciously creepy The Ghost Ship (1943) show a hint of the troublemaker to come.

Tierney found his niche, and stardom, as the titular gangster in Dillinger (1945). This lean, brutal movie falls more in the crime flick category, but has plenty of the doom and deception of noir. It was of remarkable quality for a low-budget Monogram Studios production, and the young star had a strong supporting cast, including Anne Jeffreys as his glamorous moll, and the quietly menacing Edmund Lowe.

Ironically, Lawrence Tierney was perhaps the only one who didn't feel he was ideally suited to this kind of character. In real life, the actor was already constantly in trouble with the law for drunken bar fights and other misbehavior, but he later said, 'I thought of myself as a nice guy who wouldn't do rotten things. I hated that character so much but I had to do it for the picture.' This despite the fact he would eventually be arrested more times than the real Dillinger, though admittedly for less notorious crimes.

Once he broke out in Hollywood, Lawrence Tierney worked steadily, despite his growing notoriety. In addition to his noir films, he honed his tough guy image in many different genres. He was a former inmate tracking down a less reformed criminal in San Quentin (1946), and he took a crack at the western as Jesse James in Badman's Territory (1946). In Step By Step (1946) he managed to look tough wearing high-waisted swimming trunks and white shoes, though he was not entirely convincing as a heroic former Marine.

By the late fifties Tierney's bad press caught up with him and he lost his foothold in films. To make a living, the actor tried television and returned to the stage with sufficient success. By the late seventies he had built another movie career as a reliable character actor, appearing in everything from Andy Warhol's Bad (1977) to Prizzi's Honor (1985). He was rarely in the spotlight, but he was generally good in any part he played and kept working.

Tierney also continued to keep busy with television roles on shows including Hill Street Blues, Star Trek: The Next Generation and ER. He also had an amusing turn voicing Don Brodka, the gruff store detective who catches Bart trying to shoplift a video game on The Simpsons.

In perhaps his most memorable TV experience, Tierney terrified the cast and crew of Seinfeld in a guest appearance as Alton Benes, Elaine's father. While on the set of Jerry's apartment, the actor slipped a kitchen knife into his jacket. Proving the theory that once you do stand-up, nothing is scary again, Seinfeld confronted the actor about the theft. Embarrassed, Tierney claimed he was playing a joke and then pulled out the knife and thrust it at the comedian while shrieking the famous string passage from the shower scene in Psycho. Though he was brilliant on the show, it was understandable when the shaken producers decided not to make Mr. Benes a recurring character.

Tierney found new fame, and more trouble, when Quentin Tarantino cast him as a crusty crime boss in Reservoir Dogs (1991). The role introduced the actor to a new generation, and won him appreciation for his early career he would otherwise not have attained. Still, filming was turbulent. Tierney hated his dialogue and struggled to remember his lines. He'd also fight with the cast and crew, including fistfights with Tarantino and cast member Michael Madsen, for whom he had a particular distaste. There are several filmed interviews with members of the cast and crew of the film in which they seem amused in retrospect by their experiences with the actor, but grateful to have those days behind them. Madsen almost seems nervous talking about Tierney, as if the actor is going to come back from the grave to give him another beating.

By the end of the nineties, Tierney worked less, but he remained somewhat active until a couple of years before his death in 2002. While a challenging personality, and alcoholism, kept the actor from reaching his full potential, he was such a confident performer he nevertheless built an impressive television and film legacy.

Though Lawrence Tierney made his mark in several kinds of movies, he was at the top of his game in his film noir roles. Here are some of his best roles in that genre:

Dillinger (1945)

In his break-out role, Tierney lends a specific kind of hurt to his performance as the notorious gangster. This is a man who remembers every slight he has ever received and his sense of perceived injustice fuels the entitled way he approaches the world. Tierney doesn't give the part any of the charismatic glamour of later actors who would tackle the role, instead exuding a much more plausible grim brutality.

Born to Kill (1947)

Twisting the romantic comedy trope of the “meet cute,” leading lady Claire Trevor meets the victims of Lawrence Tierney's murderous binges before she becomes acquainted with Tierney himself on a train ride. He's getting out of town until the heat dies down. She's going home after finalizing her divorce. Though she's frightened of him as soon as she sees him, the intensity that makes Tierney so dangerous also excites her. She believes too long that the passion is worth the trouble it brings.

The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947)

This has got to be Tierney's most psychotic role in his gallery of psychopaths. In a plot with dark shadings similar to the Edgar Ulmer classic Detour (1945), he is a villain who commits a crime and then thumbs a ride with the unluckiest drunkard ever. He's so mean and insensitive in this role that it's almost funny in its absurdity. Even the way he tries to pound the cigarettes out of a gas station vending machine sets you on edge, and judging from the very real startled reaction of the station attendant, there were probably plenty of terrified actors on that set.

Bodyguard (1948)

Though he gets a rare chance to play the good guy, Tierney still makes plenty of trouble in this fast-paced noir. After all, he's an ex-cop who embarks on his new profession as a private bodyguard after recklessly pounding on suspects and punching his lieutenant through a window. When he is wrongly accused of the murder of his former boss, the tightly-wound, but not quite homicidal ex-cop and his girlfriend (Priscilla Lane) are surprisingly low-key about their quest to clear his name. Still, the tension winds up in the closing scenes and it's interesting seeing Tierney try, but not quite succeed, at playing a tender-hearted boyfriend.

The Hoodlum (1951)

By the time he starred opposite his younger brother Edward in this bleak crime noir, Tierney had just about pushed his employers to the limit with his violent off-screen antics. As a result, the quality of his movies began to decline, though his performances remained strong. As bad as the drunkenness, bar fights, and arrests were for his image, the actor was consistently good. He is especially mean here as a recently released convict who repays his brother's hospitality by impregnating his girlfriend, driving her to suicide and planning a heist on the side. It sounds unbearably unpleasant, but there's a fascinating sharpness to the performances, older brother Tierney's in particular, and the action moves along briskly.

Kendahl Cruver is a writer and editor. She writes about classic movies at the aptly-named A Classic Movie Blog.