Lee Van Cleef

Clarence Leroy Lee Van Cleef, Jr. , was an American actor whose sinister features overshadowed his acting skills and typecast him as a minor villain for a decade before he achieved stardom in Spaghetti Westerns such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Hatchetfaced with piercing eyes, he declined to have his hook nose altered to play a sympathetic character in his film debut, High Noon, and was relegated to a nonspeaking outlaw as a result. Van Cleef had suffered serious injuries in a car crash, and had begun to lose interest in his apparently waning career by the time Sergio Leone gave him a major role in For a Few Dollars More. The film made him a boxoffice draw, especially in Europe.

Van Cleef was born on January 9, 1925 in Somerville, New Jersey, the son of Marion Levinia and Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef. At age 17, he obtained his high school diploma early in his senior year in order to enlist in the United States Navy in September, 1942. After basic training and further training at the Naval Fleet Sound School, he was assigned to a submarine chaser and then to a minesweeper, USS160Incredible, on which he worked as a sonarman.

Source: Wikipedia