Rip Torn, known for roles like Agent Zed, was from Temple

By JANNA ZEPP | Photos from The Associated Press

Agent Zed, leader of the secret organization monitoring intergalactic alien activity on and around Earth, was from Temple. Rip Torn, the actor who portrayed the character in the film, Men In Black, was a Central Texan whose acting career spanned more than 60 years.

Elmore Rual Torn Jr. was born on Feb. 6, 1931, in Temple, the son of Elmore Rual “Tiger” Torn Sr. and Thelma Mary Spacek Torn. The senior Elmore was an agriculturalist and economist who promoted eating of black-eyed peas, particularly as a “good luck” custom on New Year’s Day in Texas. Thelma was an aunt of actress Sissy Spacek of Quitman in East Texas.

Torn went into entertainment with a name that many assumed was a corny, ill-conceived stage name. For a while he carried his passport with him to show skeptics that his name really was Elmore Rual Torn Jr. and told them that Rip was a long-standing nickname for the men in his family.

“If anything, my name has made me work harder,” he told the New York Times. “Some people just seem to take instant umbrage at it.”

Torn was a member of the Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets, where he studied with aspirations of becoming a farmer. Instead, he graduated from the University of Texas where he studied acting under Shakespeare professor B. Iden Payne and was a member of the Alpha Nu chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity. After graduation, he served in the military police in the U.S. Army. He was a veteran of the Korean War.

Torn had a prolific filmography, was involved in many television shows and series, music videos, commercials, and work on Broadway. But misbehavior and controversy pock-marked his career, in spite of his apparent talent and many industry awards.

Torn showed great range in his career but with a crooked grin, gruff voice and devilish glint in his eyes, he was especially well-suited to playing bad boys and unpredictable characters.

“I think most actors are shy. I really do. The greatest actors can disappear. I had friends call me the Blend-In Man,” Torn said.

While he might have blended in his theatrical roles, he was a standout in his personal life. An outspoken, pro-civil rights activist since the 1950s, he attended a frank and emotional 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy about the country’s treatment of Black Americans.

“I sent away for my FBI file a few years ago and it had me listed along with James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne — and at the end of a long list of characters it said Rip Torn — Actor. And at the top it said, ‘Prominent Negroes Meeting With The Attorney General’,” he said, laughing.

When asked if he was blacklisted, Torn replied, “I wouldn’t want to dignify it with the word ‘blacklisted.’ I say ‘graylisted.’ I’d always get a role, and then they’d call me up and tell me in laborious terms that they couldn’t hire me after all. I went from doing mainstream films to awful off-off-Broadway stuff. This went on for about 16 years.”

Torn married three times and had six children and four grandchildren. His wives included actresses Ann Wedgeworth and Geraldine Page. Torn married actress Amy Wright in 1989, the union lasting until his 2019 death due to complications from Alzheimer’s.

“If you’re lucky enough to have a pretty girl love you and share herself and sleep with you, make that your secret. The best way to spoil love is by talking to too many people about it,” Torn said.

Appearing as an interview subject in Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral-history book Working, Torn confessed, “I have certain flaws in my make-up. Something called irascibility. I get angry easily. I get saddened by things easily.”

Torn bore that statement out in his occasional erratic behavior at work. While filming Maidstone in 1968, Torn hit director and star Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer. With the cameras rolling, Mailer bit Torn’s ear and they wrestled to the ground. The fight continued until it was broken up by cast and crew members. The fight is featured in the film. Although the scene may have been planned by Torn, the blood shed by both actors was real, and Torn reportedly hated Mailer’s direction. “It was kind of an awesome brawl,” Torn said, “but I got hurt much worse than he did.”

In 1994, Torn filed a defamation lawsuit against Dennis Hopper over a story Hopper told on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Hopper claimed that Torn pulled a knife on him during pre-production of the 1969 film Easy Rider. According to Hopper, Torn was originally cast, but was replaced with Jack Nicholson after the incident. Torn claimed in his lawsuit that Hopper pulled the knife on him. A trial court judge ruled in Torn’s favor and Hopper was ordered to pay $475,000 in compensatory damages, but denied Torn’s request for punitive damages, ruling Hopper had not acted with malice. Hopper appealed. On April 1, 1998, a California appellate court upheld the ruling for compensatory damages, and reversed the ruling for the punitive damages, requiring Hopper to pay another $475,000.

Torn said he was haunted for 25 years by Hopper’s perpetual rumor that he walked out on Easy Rider. “I already had a theater contract signed, and if they’d got the movie together in the right time frame, I’d have been happy to do it. I didn’t turn it down. I didn’t walk away, and I’ve never understood, given the great success the movie had, why it was necessary to scapegoat me. My lawyer keeps saying, ‘I just can’t understand why Hopper’s had it in for you.’ The whole thing did cripple my career, there’s no doubt about it. I’ve spent 25 years outliving this rumor that I always quit. It still comes up.”

After mourning the death of his longtime spouse Page in 1987, Torn underwent a career transformation in the early 1990s, thanks to films like Defending Your Life (1991). The Albert Brooks comedy, which cast him as a no-nonsense, larger-than-life defense attorney for the recently deceased, led to a long string of film and television comedies for Torn. The best of these was The Larry Sanders Show, a scathing satire of talk shows and the television industry as a whole, with Garry Shandling as the neurotic titular host of a popular late-night show and Torn as his bullish producer.

Torn said he went into acting to use his sometimes-erratic emotions to his benefit.

“Rip has an unabashed masculine drive. You can’t act that,” said playwright and fellow Texan Horton Foote, who cast Torn in The Young Man From Atlanta.

Foote certainly was right about that drive. What else would you expect from a farm boy from Temple?