13 Catholic ACTOR WHO FOUGHT IN WW2

 

 

 

You know the Hollywood history they show at the Oscars, all tuxedos, shiny statues, and perfect smiles. This isn’t that history. This is what happened before the mega studios and the agents took over. It’s the story of 13 Catholic men who traded their fame, their safety, and their health for something far bigger than box office receipts.

 We aren’t ranking them today. Rankings are for the accountants. Instead, we’ve broken this into four chapters. Think of them less like a list and more like old friends who shared the same stage, the same shadow, and the same extraordinary faith. Hit subscribe now because let’s be honest, at our age, we can’t trust our memory to find our way back next week.

 The king who needed to earn it, Clark Gable. Clark Gable was called the king of Hollywood. He was the man who said, “Frankly, my dear, he didn’t give a damn.” He was the man Gone with the Wind built its entire promotional campaign around. He was also, by baptism, a Catholic. His mother, Adeline, had brought him into the faith before she died when he was 10 months old.

 His father refused to raise him in it, and Gable spent his life neither claiming the faith publicly nor fully abandoning it. There was something in that ambiguity that suited the man he became. When his wife, Carole Lombard, died in a plane crash while returning from a war bond tour in January 1942, Gable enlisted. He did not have to.

 He was 41 years old, already the most famous male star in the world, and exempt from the draft. He went anyway. He completed aerial gunnery school and was assigned to the 351st Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force in England. He flew combat missions over Germany. Official records count five. Veterans who served alongside him insisted the number was higher.

 On at least one mission, anti-aircraft fire damaged his aircraft directly. On another, a bullet passed through his flight boot. Hermann Göring, who had watched Gable’s films and admired them in the particular way powerful men admire things they could never create, reportedly offered a reward for his capture. Hitler wanted him brought to Berlin, not shot, brought.

 Gable finished his tour, returned to Hollywood, and never spoke about any of it with any satisfaction. The men who knew him believed he was trying to die, that without Carole Lombard, the thing that had made survival worth something was gone. He did not die, he made more films, he lived another 18 years. The man who came back was quieter in ways the screen could not entirely conceal carrying somewhere in the architecture of his silence, the weight of five missions over Germany, and a faith he had inherited from a woman he never knew. The poorest rich man in

Pennsylvania, Charles Bronson. Charles Bronson was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky on November 3, 1921, the 11th of 15 children in a Lithuanian Catholic family so poor that he once went to school wearing his sister’s dress because he had no clothes of his own fit to be worn. He grew up in the coal country of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania.

 When his father died, Bronson began working the mines at age 10, earning $1 per ton of coal extracted. He spoke Lithuanian before he spoke English. He was the first person in his family to graduate high school. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces. By 1945, he was an aerial gunner aboard a B-29 Superfortress with the 61st Bombardment Squadron, 39th Bombardment Group based on Guam.

 He flew 25 combat missions over Japan. During one of them, he was wounded in both arms and received the Purple Heart. When he returned home, he said, “I never had it so good as when I entered the Army. Men were complaining around me, but I was eating and sleeping well, and I thought, ‘Geez, this is great.'” The man who would spend 30 years playing screen assassins and lone avengers had genuinely been through worse than anything a director could manufacture.

That is worth understanding the next time you watch him standing in shadow at the edge of the frame, calculating something no one else in the scene has yet understood. The Marine they didn’t cast, Tyrone Power. Tyrone Power was by 1941 one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Dark, effortlessly magnetic, capable of the kind of quiet intensity that made audiences lean forward in their seats.

 He was also a devout Catholic who had been raised in the faith and carried it without apology through a career that could have made piety an inconvenience. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1942 and trained as a transport pilot. He was not sent to a desk. He was not assigned to a film unit.

 He flew supply missions and casualty evacuations in the Pacific theater. Real missions under fire into and out of active combat zones at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Landing on contested strips of ground to pick up the wounded and bring them back. He returned to Hollywood and resumed the career that had been waiting for him. He died in 1958 at 44 on the set of Solomon and Sheba in Madrid of a heart attack. He was buried at Forest Lawn.

The obituaries mentioned the films, the Marines remembered the missions. 10 years before the Oscar, Ernest Borgnine. Ernest Borgnine was born Ermes Effron Borgnino in January 1917, the son of Italian immigrants. He was raised Catholic in Hamden, Connecticut. In 1935, straight out of high school, he enlisted in the US Navy because he saw a recruiting poster and had nothing else to do. He was discharged in 1941.

 When Pearl Harbor happened, he re-enlisted the following January. He would spend the entire war patrolling the Atlantic aboard anti-submarine warfare vessels. A total of nearly 10 years in uniform. He reached the rank of gunner’s mate first class. He won the Academy Award in 1955 for Marty, playing a lonely bronze butcher looking for connection.

 When the Navy awarded him an honorary promotion to chief petty officer in 2004, he said it meant more to him than the Oscar. He was not being diplomatic. He meant it. After his death in July 2012 at age 95, the Navy rendered full military honors at his burial. It was the appropriate ending for a man who had always been a sailor first and a movie star at a considerable distance second.

The mustache he refused to shave says our Romero says our Romero was born in 1907 in New York City to Cuban parents, raised in a devout Catholic household, and became one of Hollywood’s most reliably charming character actors before anyone knew what the Joker was. On October 12, 1942, he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard as an apprentice seaman.

 He was assigned to the Pacific theater and served aboard the USS Cavalier, participating in the invasions of Tinian and Saipan. He reached the rank of chief boatswain’s mate before his discharge. He returned to Hollywood and spent the next four decades playing slick Latin villains and debonair socialites, and eventually the Joker opposite Adam West’s Batman, a performance of gleeful committed madness that he delivered without ever shaving the mustache he had grown during the war.

 No role at any fee for the rest of his life could buy that mustache off his face. It was the one thing that belonged entirely to him. The torpedo man at 17, Rod Steiger Rod Steiger was born in 1925 in Westhampton, New York and raised in the Catholic faith. At 16, he enlisted in the US Navy with a falsified affidavit.

 Too young to serve legally, old enough to understand that the world was burning and he wanted to help put it out. He served in the Pacific as a torpedoman’s mate on destroyers, seeing action at several engagements before the war ended. After his discharge, he used the GI Bill to study acting. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1967 for In the Heat of the Night, playing a segregationist Southern sheriff forced to confront his own limitations alongside Sidney Poitier.

The performance required him to hold two contradictory things in the same body at the same time without resolution. The man who held a conviction and the man who felt that conviction beginning to fail. That skill is not something you find in a classroom. Steiger found it on a destroyer in the Pacific at 17 years old when he was too far from shore to go home.

 The colorblind Samson, Victor Mature. Victor Mature was born in 1913 in Louisville, Kentucky to Italian immigrant parents raised in the Catholic tradition. He was colorblind which should have disqualified him from military service. It did not. He enlisted in the US Coast Guard in 1942 and served for 3 years rising to the rank of Chief Boatswain’s Mate, the same rank as Cesar Romero forming an invisible fraternity of Catholic men who had found their way to the same waterline.

 After the war, Mature returned to Hollywood and was cast by Cecil B. DeMille as Samson, the strongest man in scripture. He spent the rest of his career playing men of physical enormity and accepted this with a cheerfulness that might have been performance but looked very much like genuine peace. He once said he was not an actor, that he had 56 films to prove it.

 The men who had served alongside him on Coast Guard cutters would have understood that particular humor. There is a way of looking at the things the world calls achievement after you have done something that the world cannot measure. The altar boy who didn’t serve twice, Pat O’Brien. Pat O’Brien was born in 1899 to an Irish Catholic family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

All four of whose grandparents had crossed the Atlantic from Ireland. As a boy, he served as an altar boy at Gesu Church. He attended Marquette Academy alongside a fellow student named Spencer Tracy. And when the United States entered World War I, the two young men enlisted in the Navy together though neither saw combat before the war ended.

By World War II, O’Brien was in his 40s, a working character actor whose career had been built largely on playing priests, cops, and the loyal friend of tougher men. He served the Second War through the USO, touring military bases and hospitals, performing for the men who were going where he could no longer go.

 He had played Father Jerry Connolly, the priest who stood in the doorway between a man and his execution in Angels with Dirty Faces. He had played Father Duffy in The Fighting 69th. He understood what it meant to stand in a room full of frightened men and tell them that something larger than their fear was present. The men in the wards remembered him.

 Not the films, the dancer who left, Gene Kelly. Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh in 1912, the son of an Irish Catholic family in a working-class neighborhood. He was raised in the faith, attended Catholic school, and served mass as an altar boy. In 1939, he witnessed the poverty of Mexico and the wealth of the church operating alongside it, and severed his formal ties.

 He spent the remainder of his life describing himself as agnostic. None of which prevented him from enlisting in the US Navy in 1944, taking a leave of absence from a contract with MGM that most men in Hollywood would have protected at any cost. Anchors Aweigh had been completed, On the Town was waiting. He was at the precise moment of greatest artistic momentum. He left anyway.

 He served stateside, working in the Navy’s photographic section, creating training and documentary films. He was discharged in 1946 and returned to the work that would define his legacy, Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris. The faith he walked away from had given him something he never entirely discarded.

 The belief that what you do with your body and your discipline is a form of devotion. Watch him work. Watch the absolute precision of it, the refusal to do less than everything. Something from those altar boy years remained in the architecture of how he moved, even after he stopped believing in what he had once been moving toward.

 The Irishman they couldn’t fire, James Cagney. James Cagney was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a family of Irish Catholic descent. His father, a bartender, died young. His mother kept the household together with a precision and severity that Cagney carried into every character he ever played. He was a devout Catholic in ways that sat strangely alongside his screen image, the gangster, the killer, the man who shoved a grapefruit into a woman’s face and became famous for it.

 Off screen, he was quiet, formal, deeply private, and spent his free time on a farm in Upstate New York learning to paint and raise horses. During World War II, Cagney did not enlist in formal military service. He went through the USO performing for troops at bases across the country and abroad, and served as president of the Screen Actors Guild throughout the war years.

 A role that involved genuine labor, real organizational responsibility, and defense of the men and women in his industry who were serving or struggling. He won his Academy Award for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942 playing George M. Cohan, the greatest American patriot the stage had ever produced. He donated his salary for the film to war relief.

 The gesture was noticed. For Cagney, it was entirely consistent. The one who came back different, Spencer Tracy. Spencer Tracy was born in 1900 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a family of Irish Catholic descent. He attended Marquette Academy alongside Pat O’Brien. When World War I broke out, they enlisted in the Navy together. Tracy was at Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia when the armistice was signed.

He never fired a weapon in anger. He spent the rest of his life playing men who had Father Flanagan in Boys Town, the district attorney in Fury, the judge in Judgment at Nuremberg. He had a particular gift for moral authority without self-righteousness, for the expression of conviction that had been tested rather than inherited.

He was also an alcoholic for most of his adult life, a man in extended and devastating private combat with something the church gave him no adequate tools to defeat. His faith never left him, even when it brought him no comfort. He died in 1967, two weeks after completing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

 He had made peace with Katherine Hepburn, with himself only partially. The grave is in Forest Lawn. The name is carved in stone. The gap between what the stone says and what the man knew is where everything that mattered actually lived. The rough voice from the Atlantic, Pat O’Brien’s brother-in-arms John Ford, was born John Martin Feeney in 1894, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants from County Galway.

 He would become the most honored director in American film history, winning four Academy Awards for directing, a record never matched. He was also, when the Navy asked him to be, a combat documentarian willing to stand in the middle of a battle with a camera. He was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve and eventually rose to rear admiral.

 In June 1942, he was at Midway Island with a small film crew when the Japanese attacked. He positioned his cameras in the most exposed positions available, was wounded by shrapnel in the arm during the bombing, and kept filming. The resulting documentary, The Battle of Midway, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature and was screened for the families of men who had died in the fight.

 He also documented the Normandy landings and served in various capacities throughout the war, eventually receiving the Legion of Merit, the Purple Heart, and the Air Medal. He was 60 years old when he received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1973. By his own accounting, the medal he was most quietly proud of was not any of those.

 It was the one the Navy gave him for Midway, filmed while bleeding, in a war he did not have to enter, for men who were dying in front of his lens and deserved to be remembered. The one who never talked about it. Christopher Lee was born in 1922 in the aristocratic enclave of Belgravia, London. His heritage was a study in stark cinematic contrasts.

 His father, a dashing Anglican lieutenant colonel, infused him with British military discipline and an unyielding posture. His mother, Countess Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano, was an Italian Catholic beauty descended from a lineage so ancient it claimed a direct link to Charlemagne. Lee identified throughout his life as Anglo-Catholic, a designation that split the difference between his parents’ traditions in a way that seemed entirely consistent with a man who spent 60 years playing figures whose nature refused easy classification. He was a creature of two

worlds, the stiff upper lip of the British Empire and the dark operatic romanticism of old Europe. When the world caught fire in 1940, Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force. What happened next remains a master class in historical smoke and mirrors. In later years, Lee dropped tantalizing hints of attachments to the Special Air Service, the Long Range Desert Group, and the Special Operations Executive E, the infamous Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

 While modern historians have questioned the literal ink on some of those operational records, the verifiable truth is no less striking. Lee served as an RAF intelligence liaison officer attached to special forces units across the Mediterranean and Yugoslavia between 1943 and 1945. He navigated a fractured chaotic continent moving through the ruins of Italy and the partisan held forests of the Balkans.

 He emerged from the ashes of World War II speaking six languages fluently and carrying something behind his eyes that no acting school curriculum has ever adequately explained. It was the gaze of a man who had looked upon the visceral horror of the mid-century and chosen to keep its secrets. When journalists would later press him on his wartime exploits, his standard response was as polite as it was chilling.

 Can you keep a secret? Yes. Well, so can I. Decades later, when Peter Jackson cast him as Saruman, the fallen wizard, the servant of darkness who was once the greatest of the wise, Lee brought an irreplaceable gravity to the set. He was the only member of the massive cast who had actually met J.R.R. Tolkien, having chanced upon the author in an Oxford pub in his youth.

Crucially, he was also the only one who had survived a total global war. The collision of his past and his craft famously culminated during the filming of The Return of the King. Jackson was directing Lee on how to react when Saruman was stabbed in the back, instructing the veteran actor to gasp in pain.

 Lee stopped the director mid-sentence. “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody’s stabbed in the back?” Lee asked quietly. “Because I do.” He explained that when the lungs are punctured, the breath is trapped. There is no grand theatrical scream, only a sharp choke intake of air, the sound of a life escaping. Jackson quietly stepped back and let the veteran do his work.

 At 6-ft 5-in tall, speaking in a resonant sepulchral baritone, Lee didn’t need to simulate authority. He had once, in some configuration of uniform and shadow, operated near the margins of things that did not get written into official histories. What ownership cannot buy, Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes died in 1976 at 90 lb, his body destroyed, his fingernails uncurled and long.

 It took fingerprint records to confirm who he was. The man who had once conquered the skies, reshaped Hollywood, and commanded empires of aviation and real estate had shrunk into a phantom. The sheer scale of his wealth stood in grotesque contrast to the minimalism of his physical existence. He had spent his final years retreating deeper into a hyper-sterile darkened labyrinth of his own design.

 A billionaire king ruling over a kingdom of dust, hypodermic needles, and profound silence. He was not Catholic. He was not, by the end, much of anything. He was the richest man in the world and he died in a condition that the men on this list, the ones who flew over Germany, the ones who crossed the Pacific on destroyers, the ones who sang for men in hospital wards who were about to lose their legs, would have recognized as a particular kind of defeat.

 To the veterans of the flake-filled skies and the blood-slicked decks, defeat was a tangible enemy. It looked like a broken line, a sinking vessel or a comrade lost to the mud. But those men understood that as long as they stood together, their sacrifice possessed a sacred geometry. It pointed towards something larger than themselves.

 Hughes’ defeat was of an entirely different, terrifying order. Not poverty, not failure, something worse. The complete absence of anything outside the self that the self considered worth serving. When a life is stripped of a higher purpose, the mind inevitably turns inward, cannibalizing itself. For Hughes, the world outside became a hostile wilderness of microbes and conspiracies.

 In his manic quest to protect his individual existence, he built a fortress that quickly mutated into a tomb. His billions bought him total autonomy, but total autonomy without connection is merely a velvet exile. He became the ultimate solipsist, a man who possessed everything but belonged to nothing.