Celebrity Biographies
R. Lee Ermey
“You clumsy recruit, I’m going to make a man out of you, even if it’s more difficult than shrinking it from the blacks of El Congo.” R. Lee Ermey, who played the tough sergeant in “Full Full Metal Jacket,” passed away at the age of 74 on April 15, 2018, from complications of pneumonia. “God bless you,” declared Bill Rogin, his representative, who released the sad news. “Don’t go softly into that good night. Rage, rage at the dying of the light. RIP friend,” said Matthew Modine, a co-star in the war film.
Born in Emporia, Kansas, on March 24, 1944, Ronald Lee Ermey practically played himself in the role of Full Metal Jacket that he left behind for the memory. After being arrested several times during his youth, a judge gave him a choice in 1961 between going to prison or trying to carve out a righteous future in the army. He ended up in the Marines, where he became a drill sergeant, and subsequently served 14 months in Vietnam, and more than two years in Okinawa, Japan. Throughout his life he suffered from nightmares due to his experiences in combat, as a consequence of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
When he graduated, he studied acting at the University of Manila. He immediately found work in the cinema playing soldiers, first as Sergeant Loyce, a character very similar to himself, in The Boys from C Company , and then as a helicopter pilot in Francis Ford Coppola ‘s Apocalypse Now , where he served as a military officer. as well as a military adviser. Stanley Kubrick gave him the role of his most remembered, Sergeant Harman from Full Metal Jacket , because in the casting he managed to spend fifteen minutes saying obscenities, without repeating himself once.
Later he appeared in titles such as Mississippi Burns , Body Snatchers , Grab Me Those Ghosts , Starship Troopers or X-Men: The Final Stand , and also had small appearances in series. In Toy Story and its two sequels, he voiced the sergeant leading the toy soldiers.
Married in 1975, they had four children. In the last years of his life, he was very critical of Barack Obama and a supporter of Donald Trump. He complained that this political positioning had cost him Hollywood to turn its back on him.