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Lee Marvin Lee Marvin was born in New York City, N.Y. Young Marvin was thrown out of dozens of schools for incorrigibility. His parents took him to Florida, where he attended St. Leo's Preparatory School near Dade City. Dismissed there as well, Marvin enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp at the beginning of WWII. In the Battle of Saipan in June of 1944, he was wounded in the buttocks by Japanese fire which severed his sciatic nerve. He received a medical discharge and got menial work as a plummers apprentice in Woodstock, N.Y. While he was repairing a toilet at the local community theater, he was asked to replace an ailing actor in rehearsal. He immediately fell in love with the theater, and went to New York City, where he studied and played in small roles in stock Off-Broadway. He landed the role of an extra in Henry Hathaway's You're in the Navy Now, (1951), and found that his role had been expanded because Hathaway had taken a liking to him. Returning to the stage, he made his Broadway debut in Billy Budd, and after a succession of small TV roles, moved to Hollywood, where he began playing heavies and cops in roles of increasingly size and frequency. Given a leading role in Eight Iron Men, (1952), he followed it with enormously memorable heavies in The Big Heat, (1953). Now established as a major screen villian, Marvin began shifting towards leading roles with a successful run as a police detective in the TV series M Squad, (1957). A surprise Oscar award for his dual role as a drunken gunfighter and his evil, noseless brother in the western movie Cat Balou, (1965), placed him in the upper tiers of Hollywood leading men, and he filled out his career playing predominantly action-oriented films. A long term romantic relationship with Michelle Triola led, after their break-up, to a higly publicized lawsuit in which Triola asked for a substantial portion of Marvin's assets. Her case failed its main pursuit, but but it did manage to establish legal precedent for the rights of unmarried cohabitors, the so called "Palimony" law. Marvin continued to make films of varying quality, always as the star, until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1987.