Robert Ryan: When Personality and Type-Casting Clash

It was Robert Ryan's birthday on the 11th (and he was a Marine) so TCM aired a many Robert Ryan movies that day and so I've been watching quite a few of his movies in the last few days.  And Robert Ryan, like another Robert: Robert Mitchum, terrifies me because he often played the villain in film noir movies, or at least someone reprehensible.  Robert Ryan mostly worked in 3 genres: westerns, war movies, and film noir/crime movies.  I can only think of one movie, On Dangerous Ground, in which he was a traditional leading man (which features a reunion with Ida Lupino, who gets terrorized by Robert Ryan in Beware, My Lovely).  Ryan being in war movies make sense, he was a Marine (though he later adapted the pacifist views of his Quaker wife).  And during the 40s/50s, pretty much everyone and their brother were in a film noir movie of some kind.  But Ryan being a villain on the surface doesn't make sense.  He is not as handsome as someone like Cary Grant but he didn't look like Peter Lorre, an actor who the required malice in most of his roles is supplied by just looking at his face.  Reading about his life, Ryan was a very liberal Democrat who worked for civil rights for a majority of his life.  Which makes his role in Crossfire, playing a racist and anti-Semitic soldier, clearly against his personal beliefs.  I think the skill that Ryan really had that drove his performances was his ability to play characters with rage just simmering under the surface.  In a lot of his roles, Ryan is able to turn on a dime from a calm and collected person to someone with a explosion of rage but you can still have some sympathy towards; this is especially true in Act of Violence and Beware, My Lovely.  With Ryan, I have the hardest time being able to separate his professional life and his personal life because he so often played terrible people.  It is usually the reverse, that an actor/director's personal life/beliefs can hinder my enjoyment of his or her movies (I'm looking at you Roman Polanski).  By watching a great variety of his movies and reading more about him, I am hoping to bring together his professional work and his personal beliefs to enjoy his work better.