Robert Ryan played evil roles with a relish

Actor Robert Ryan spent a good deal of his life promoting peace, civil rights and other social causes. In his long film career, he did something more daring: He willingly became the face of the very evils he denounced.

In Crossfire (1947), Ryan plays a soldier whose hatred of Jews leads to murder. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) casts him as a man who kills a Japanese farmer as revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor. In Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Ryan's holdup man bridles at the idea of a partner in crime who is black.

Ryan garnered critical praise for such roles but not the leading-man status enjoyed by Hollywood's good guys. "I think he took them because he really believed that he was making a contribution to people's overall sense of what it was to be a minority or to be discriminated against," his co-star and friend Harry Belafonte tells The Lives of Robert Ryan author J.R. Jones.