It’s among the most recognizable issues/36/images in the history of film: George C. Scott as General George S. Patton, standing before an American flag as big as the continent itself, helmet on, boots polished, brass gleaming, hands wound tightly around a riding crop as he prepares his soldiers to go into battle. This unforgettable sequence, which opens 1970’s Patton, is the quintessence of great moviemaking: entirely compelling—and wholly artificial. The inspirational speech in question was never really made by Patton, but pieced together from several of Patton’s addresses to his troops. The backdrop flag was purely symbolic, meant to suggest the enormity of difference between the America of WWII and the America of the Vietnam era. And at the center of it all was Scott, rasping out Patton’s words with the granite resolve that was his trademark—an actor in costume delivering the performance of his life in a film he was miserable making.

Scott died in September, at the age of 71, leaving behind a legacy of film, theater and television performances that, like the man himself, were notable for their candor and primordial intensity. Although he considered himself primarily a technician who pursued acting not as a means of self-expression but as an exercise of skill, his work inarguably conveys the sense of an actor whose soul became the substance of whatever role he took.

Scott’s appearance on a stage or screen was always a moment of impact. His penetrating stare, distinctive voice and commanding physicality brought uncommon power and grace to the work of good writers and directors, and transformed otherwise forgettable product into something worth at least a look. He was best known for his characterizations of articulate yet absurdly volatile men, men ensnared in unwinnable situations espousing unpopular truths, exploding with unstoppable rage: the swashbuckling general in Dr. Strangelove, ready to blow up the world if it’ll teach the Russians a lesson; the frustrated Chief of Medicine in The Hospital, accusing a head nurse of training her incompetent staff at a concentration camp; the straight-laced father in Hardcore, kicking down brothel doors in an effort to find his runaway daughter.

His agility as an actor enabled Scott to be just as convincing when the script didn’t call for the fury and bluster at which he excelled. Watch him in Richard Lester’s 1968 drama Petulia, lending a poignant, soft-spoken tenderness to his role as a lonely doctor offering care and affection to the mixed-up woman who’s fallen in love with him. Or as the New York lawyer who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes in the 1971 comedy They Might Be Giants, clearly demented as he puffs on his trusty meerschaum, yet dazzling everyone around him with one quick-witted insight after another. Scott once told an interviewer that his style was more comedic than people realized. It’s easy to see in a farce like Strangelove, with his bombastic Gen. Buck Turgidson perched like an eagle on his seat in the War Room, plumping for the apocalypse one moment, whispering cuddly-poos to his girlfriend over the phone the next. But it’s there, too, in more subtle form, in some of his dramatic roles—like the ragged, boozy preacher calling for the execution of sinners in The Hanging Tree; or the preening big-city attorney being foiled in a small-town courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. Both performances—his first on film —are vintage Scott: two men taking themselves very seriously, and acting like bigger fools than they’ll ever know.

Scott’s way with a script came in part from his love of words. He taught a creative writing course while in the Marines, and briefly attended journalism school before leaving to pursue acting full-time in 1950. He appeared in 125 regional theater productions, then got his break when he was seen by the director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, Joseph Papp, in 1957. In just three productions over the course of four months, Scott rose from obscurity to award-winning favorite of the New York stage. Then he was discovered again, this time by Hollywood.

The first five years of his film career were fruitful ones. First came The Hanging Tree and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (for which Scott received his first Oscar nomination) in 1959, followed by his portrayal of a vicious promoter in 1961’s The Hustler, which earned him his second Oscar nod. The period ended with his performance in Strangelove, which called for him to endure the ritual of daily rewrites demanded by director Stanley Kubrick, whom Scott respected but didn’t hesitate to tell one interviewer was “an incredibly, depressingly serious man.”

A familiar face on film throughout the 1960s, in roles as disparate as the three-card-monte hustler in The Flim-Flam Man, and Abraham, the first patriarch of Israel, in The Bible, Scott had his golden period in the ’70s, appearing in 15 films across a wide range of genres. Some, like The Hindenburg and Oklahoma Crude, are best forgotten. But this era also produced his two most powerful performances. The Hospital (1971), Paddy Chayefsky’s indictment of the medical establishment, featured Scott as a gifted, deeply committed physician with a volcanic temperament, so exasperated by his peers and disgusted by life that he’s ready to end it all. His portrayal of the suicidal Dr. Herbert Bock is a potent mix of rage and quiet despair, and earned him his fourth Oscar nomination—which no one expected him to win. After all, it was only a year after he’d famously refused to accept the Oscar he’d won for Patton.

The Patton experience was an unpleasant one for Scott. While he loved the complexities of Patton himself, he called the movie “a dreadful misapprehension” of the truth of the man, feeling it made Patton appear more bloodthirsty and cruel than he actually was, without focusing enough on his other dimensions. Still, in the finished product Scott is brilliant, portraying Patton the way he might well have portrayed himself—as a man of dignity, vulnerability and punch; as sensitive as he was harsh, with a gift for eloquence whether mapping out strategy or reciting his own verse; a man who truly believed he was an ageless warrior traveling through the battles of time.

As for the Patton Oscar, Scott had informed the committee long before the awards ceremony that he wasn’t interested in playing their game—just as he’d done nine years earlier with The Hustler. He accepted awards for his film and television work, but distrusted the Oscars, believing they had more to do with industry lobbying than excellence in filmmaking. Scott preferred the immediacy of live theater to the tedium of making movies, and claimed he continued to do films only for the money. In 1974 he attempted to circumvent the Hollywood system by producing, directing and distributing The Savage Is Loose on his own—including renting a theater in New York where it could play for a solid year. The story of a shipwrecked family coming to terms with life on a tropical island, Savage was a critical and financial disaster that, in the end, might’ve benefited from studio distribution after all. While no masterpiece, the film is a fascinating exploration of primitive male and female instincts, and deserved a better fate.

Off screen, Scott often resembled the volatile characters he played so well. For much of his life he was a hard drinker, with a violent temper that often found him trading blows and harsh words. He had his nose broken five times, and was known on occasion to fight with directors, other actors, and even with himself. Once, overcome with frustration in the middle of a stage production, he took a punch at a backstage mirror and had to finish his performance wearing a rubber glove to catch the blood pouring out of his hand.

In his later years, Scott’s film persona changed. While he continued to work in television and the theater (receiving critical acclaim in 1996 for the Broadway revival of Inherit the Wind), the movie roles grew smaller, the characters more grandfatherly, less grand. In his last film appearance, as an elderly mob boss in Sidney Lumet’s remake of Gloria, there’s still that strong presence; still a hint of impending threat; still a trace of that unmistakable voice—which in its prime sounded like a cauldron of gravel soup coming to a boil. But Lumet’s lukewarm script and direction don’t give Scott anywhere to go with the role, and in the end you’re thankful he only had to appear in two scenes.

In a way, it’s fitting, given his love/hate relationship with the movies, that Scott went out on so quiet a note. It was the opportunity to excel, not a thirst for acclaim, that was his driving force as an actor. In an industry built on our collective weakness for the pretty, the predictable and the profitable, George C. Scott’s career was a reminder that there will always be room for greatness. MM