Academy Award winner and TV star Ernest Borgnine was not your average Hollywood star. For the most part, Hollywood never found Borgnine the kind of actor that would simply blend in. Ernest Borgnine, dead at 95, was one of the most unconventional stars in Hollywood.

The Associated Press reports Ernest Borgnine died yesterday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Spokesman Harry Flynn said the star of “McHale’s Navy” passed on Sunday after suffering a renal failure.

Born in 1917, in a family of Italian immigrants, Borgnine went through several other carriers, such as truck driver and even soldier in World War II. Only after the war he found his real calling, and that was acting. One of his first parts was in the Pearl Harbor saga “From Here to Eternity” in the 1953’s. He was Sgt. Fatso Judson, the sadistic superior who often had something to settle with Frank Sinatra’s character. From here on, Ernest Borgnine would become one of Hollywood’s most popular actors.

But it was his performance as “Marty”, the lonely Bronx butcher out looking for love, that really made Ernest Borgnine famous. In the end, it was this part that got him an Oscar. In an interview he gave in 1966, Borgnine confessed winning the best actor Oscar award wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for his mother’s support. 

“I just want to thank my mother for giving me the idea to get into this wonderful profession” the actor said both in his Oscar acceptance speech and his 1966 interview. But as the actor confessed, the much desired Oscar also was responsible for most troubles in his personal life. 

He was married 5 times and spent more hours on movie and sitcom sets than at home. It took him four failed marriages before he finally met the woman that understood his love for the cinema. “The Oscar made me a star, and I’m grateful” reads Borgnine’s interview. “But I feel had I not won the Oscar I wouldn’t have gotten into the messes I did in my personal life”.

Last year, Ernest Borgnine received a SAG lifetime honor. During his acceptance speech he recalled how he began acting. “I was sitting at the kitchen table and I saw this light. No kidding. It sounds crazy. And 10 years later, I had Grace Kelly handing me an Academy Award” he said.