Richard Jaeckel

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Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 - June 14, 1997) was an American actor.

Jaeckel was born in Long Beach, New York. A short, but tough guy, he played a variety of characters in his 50 years in movies and television and became one of Hollywood's best known character actors. Jaeckel got his start in the business at the age of 17 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 US 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 daughter's boyfriend, in the celebrated 1952 film Come Back, Little Sheba, co-starring with Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, and Terry Moore. 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, Ulzana's Raid and Twilight's Last Gleaming.

The highlight of Jaeckel's career was in 1971, when he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sometimes a Great Notion. He had a recurring role in the short-lived Andy Griffith vehicle Salvage 1. In his later years, Jaeckel was known to TV audiences as Lt. Ben Edwards on the series Baywatch. He also appeared on TV Series Spenser: For Hire.

Jaeckel died in 1997, aged 70, after a three year battle with melanoma, at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. His son, Barry, is a professional golfer who has won on the PGA Tour.