[4] Despite his typical screen persona as an unsophisticated tough guy with a Brooklyn accent, he actually attended Yale University.

[2][5] With his burly frame and good-natured grin, he almost always played punch-drunk prizefighters, affable soldiers or sailors, or Runyonesque gangsters.

In a famous Hollywood anecdote, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn had Hymer removed from the studio after he showed up for work drunk.

Hymer, in his usual Brooklynesque dumb-bell character, played the slow-witted assistant to police lieutenant Kenneth Harlan.

Grimly resolving to avenge Harlan's death, and suddenly losing all vestiges of dumbness, Hymer played the rest of the movie straight, in his own, dialect-free voice.