a private 1st class was in the first wave of soldiers landing at Omaha Beach (Normandy) and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, and after WW2 was cab driver, a Fred Astaire dance studio ballroom dancing teacher, then became a Tony winning, Emmy and Oscar nominated, actor with a long career

Charles Durning was 12 years old when his father, James, an Irish immigrant who had lost a leg in World War I died of the effects of mustard gas exposure. He had nine siblings and five of his sisters died of smallpox or scarlet fever - three within a two-week period, and much of his early life was spent in hardship.  His mother struggled to support her children by working in the laundry at the United States Military Academy at nearby West Point, Durning dropped out of high school at 16, and finished after WW2

Although he displayed a passion for entertaining others, a high school teacher told him that he was talentless in art, language, and math and was better suited to working in an office. He was undeterred, however, and would become one of the greatest character actors in living memory.

While working as an usher in a burlesque theatre, he was hired to replace a drunken actor on stage. Subsequently, he performed in roughly 50 stock company productions and in various off-Broadway plays before getting into Broadway theater productions

Durning was drafted at age 20, and assigned to the 1st Infantry Division and was in the first wave of American troops on Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy, he had to jettison his weapon and gear in order to swim ashore and saw mortally wounded comrades offering themselves as human shields. He was the only survivor of his unit on D-Day due to a machine gun ambush

He was wounded twice more, was captured and was one of the few survivors of the Malmedy massacre in Belgium when German troops opened fire on dozens of American POWs.

After being wounded by a German anti-personnel mine in the Bocage, he spent six months recovering. 

Several months later, in Belgium, Durning was stabbed eight times by a bayonet-wielding teenage German soldier. That day, he survived by killing the German with a rock in hand-to-hand combat. Durning recovered from those wounds and was released from the hospital just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was taken prisoner.

Durning was in the 100th Infantry Division, and participated in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. 

He was discharged with the rank of Private First Class on January 30, 1946.

Durning was a fan of Jimmy Cagney and he tried singing, dancing, and stand-up comedy. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts until he was kicked out. “They basically said you have no talent and you couldn’t even buy a dime’s worth of it if it was for sale,” Durning told The New York Times.

He worked a number of make-do jobs - cab driver, dance instructor, doorman, dishwasher, telegram deliveryman, bridge painter, tourist guide, plumber’s helper, elevator operator and night watchman on the New York docks,  and was a professional ballroom dancer, teaching ballroom dancing on for about five years at the Fred Astaire Studios, and an Arthur Murray studio in New York City - all while waiting for a shot at an acting career, and despite the machine gun wounds to his right leg

He had a role in The Sting (1973) with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and notable Durning movie roles included “Dick Tracy,” “Home for the Holidays,”  and “O Brother Where Art Thou?”

Other film credits include Dog Day Afternoon with Al Pacino; Twilight's Last Gleaming with Burt Lancaster; True Confessions with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, and he played a man who falls in love with Dustin Hoffman’s cross-dressing character in “Tootsie”

In 1976, he received both an Emmy and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the television mini-series Captains and the Kings.

 In 1979, he played Doc Hopper, a man who owns a frog leg restaurant and the main antagonist in The Muppet Movie. In Tootsie, he played a suitor to Dustin Hoffman's cross-dressing lead character. The two actors worked together again in a 1985 TV production of Death of a Salesman. 

Then he showed his singing and dancing skills as the two-stepping Texas governor in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with Dolly Parton.

 

On television he played in the Burt Reynolds's TV series, Evening Shade, and appeared with Reynolds in 1981's Sharky's Machine, and had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond as the Barone family's long-suffering parish priest, Father Hubley. 

He also appeared on the FX television series Rescue Me, playing Mike Gavin, the retired firefighter father of Denis Leary's character, and the Emmy-winning musical "Mrs. Santa Claus" (1996), with Angela Landsbury.

He tried to perform in at least one play a year. In 1996 he fought a courtroom duel with George C. Scott in the Broadway revival of “Inherit the Wind,” the drama by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee based on the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Mr. Durning played the prosecutor, a character based on William Jennings Bryan, and Scott, in his last Broadway role, was the defense attorney, modeled on Clarence Darrow.

For his numerous roles on television, he earned nine Emmy Award nominations. He also won a Golden Globe and was nominated for 2 Academy Awards. He was honored at age 84 with a Life Achievement Award by the Screen Actors Guild.

In 2007 the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the school that he said had long ago rejected him, created a scholarship in honor of him and two other alumni, Anne Bancroft and Gena Rowlands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Durning
https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/career-advice/military-transition/famous-veteran-charles-durning.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-durning/character-actor-world-war-two-hero-charles-durning-dies-at-89-idUSBRE8BO04A20121225

http://www.military-money-matters.com/charles-durning.html#axzz7KevqN6kw

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-charles-durning-20121226-story.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2012/12/25/charles-durning-dies-actor/1790203/

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/movies/charles-durning-prolific-character-actor-dies-at-89.html

This summation of the above articles took 2 hours, and was so satisfying, as I strive to outdo all the sources I find by creating a better article than any one of them, but because such extensively researched, carefully crafted, and often re-edited posts take so long, I rarely can make time for them. They are something I really love to do, and it's from respect for the person the post is about.