RIP Rip Torn

One of my all time favorites. I hate this.

TIL Rip Torn’s real last name was … Torn. I always assumed it was a 'nym.

RIP. A really interesting guy, the proverbial troubled broody angry young man actor during the 60s and 70s who went on to have a second career playing hardass bosses in comedies (while still being troubled offscreen.)

“If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” Best character in that movie.

Oh man, I looooooved Rip Torn! RIP sir.

“Edwards, let’s put it on.”

“Put what on?”

“The last suit you’ll ever wear.”

I hate it when you go years thinking an actor died, only to learn after they actually died that they’ve been alive this whole time. Then you have to be sad about it all over again.

I had no idea he was 88.

The first movie I ever saw with him in it. He tended to steal the scenes he was in.

This guy, at the age of 79, got so drunk that he broke into a bank, that he thought was his home.

Legendary man. There will never be another.

I can’t even recall Rip Torn as a young man.

The ending of Payday is one of the most 70s thing you will ever see, and it’s premised on how Rip Torn is a fucking force of nature. He plays one of the decade’s great anti-heroes, a drunken, womanizing, vulgar, self-centered country singer named Maury Dann who stabs someone to death during a scuffle. At the end of the movie, as the law is closing in on him in his hotel room, this happens (the link is cued up to the last ten minutes of Payday):

70s cinema doesn’t get much more 70s than that.

-Tom

Aw man, I love this guy. Such a bummer. RIP.

I never noticed before, but young RIP torn looks like James Remar when he’s yelling.

I am going to miss his work. Wonder actor.

I love Rip Torn and will certainly miss his outsized presence in the movies and TV. One movie he had a big part in that I’m a particular fan of was Defending Your Life, an Al Brooks movie in which people kind of review their lives after death, and figure out what they did right, what was not so great, that kind of thing. Rip Torn plays Brooks’s case worker, kind of - here’s a scene where he explains how it works -

I love the way Rip plays things, he’s partly there to help but he keeps needling and tormenting Brooks along the way, calling him “little brain” and such. It’s a lightweight movie, kind of a sunnier flip side of Beetlejuice’s civil service view of the afterlife. But all the actors are great and it’s a fun watch, I recommend it if you haven’t seen it.

“Force of nature”, yeah that works. RIP, Rip.

Most good 70s films are just a PSA for seatbelts.

I remember him as the bad guy in Beastmaster

Oh no! He ruled in Larry Sanders. I must confess ignorance of much of the rest of his long and storied career. riprip