Richard Jaeckel Movies and Career Information

Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 – June 14, 1997) was an American actor of film and television. Jaeckel was born in Long Beach, New York. A short, but tough guy, he played a variety of characters during his fifty years in movies & television and became one of Hollywood's best known character actors. Jaeckel got his start in the business at the age of seventeen while working as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox studios in Hollywood. A casting director auditioned him for a key role in the 1943 film Guadalcanal Diary, Jaeckel won the role and settled into a lengthy career in supporting parts. He served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1949, then starred in two of the most remembered war films of 1949, Battleground and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. He also played the role of Turk, the roomer's boyfriend, in the celebrated 1952 film Come Back, Little Sheba, co-starring with Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, and Terry Moore. In 1960, he appeared as Angus Pierce in the Western Flaming Star which starred Elvis Presley. He played Lee Marvin's able second-in-command in The Dirty Dozen for director Robert Aldrich. Jaeckel appeared in several other Aldrich films, including Attack,