BIOGRAPHY
As a boy, as soon as he had mastered English, he made speeches to his family and friends. His favourite was Theodore
Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, which he had committed to memory. He hoped to become a criminal lawyer to
defend the human beings who were abused and exploited. With this purpose he entered Townsend Harris High School and
after that City College. It was at City College that he decided to forego his law career to be an actor.
He won a scholarship at the American Academy of Dramatic Art with a delivery of the Brutus and Cassius quarrel scene
from Julius Caesar.He was 19 when he entered dramatic school and shortly thereafter changed his name to Robinson a name he had heard while sitting in the balcony of the Criterion Theatre. He finally broke into the theatre in 1915 in a play called ”Under Fire.“ He got the part because he was multilingual, an attribute called for in the script. Role followed role and he received many good notices.
He joined the Theatre Guild and played a great variety of roles. In such productions as The Adding Machine, The Brothers Karamazov, Right You Are, If You Think You Are and Juarez and Maximilian. He starred for the first time in The Kibitzer, a play of which he was the co-author. In January, 1927, Robinson married Gladys Lloyd, an actress.
Robinson had experimented with several screen roles in silent pictures but he was not happy with the result. With the
addition of sound to the shadows, however, Robinson’s interest was renewed and he tried his first talking-picture
The Hole in the Wall. There followed The Widow from Chicago and a short time later, in 1931, Little
Caesar.
Little Caesar becomes at Robinson’s hands a figure out of a Greek tragedy, a cold, ignorant, merciless killer, driven
on and on by an insatiable lust for power.
It was sometimes said that Robinson was selected to play the role of Little Caesar because of a resemblance to Al Capone, the Chicago vice baron. Robinson doubted this theory, as there was no real-life resemblance. Hollywood makeup artists, however, always managed to make Robinson look as sinister as Capone was reputed to be. His portrayal of Little Caesar came to be considered a classic, and there followed others in the curled lip mold-Smart Money, Five Star Final, Bullets or Ballots, Kid Galahad and A Slight Case of Murder.
The actor thought ”Five Star Final“ one of his finest tough guy pictures. In it he played Randall, the editor of a
muckraking tabloid. This film, released in 1931, along with many of his other movies, has been revived from time to
time on television.
Robinson’s first real departure from his two-fisted type of role on the screen was Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet in
1940, and even this film about syphilis was billed as ”the war against the greatest public enemy of all.“
From 1929 to 1966 Robinson appeared in more than 100 films. His name usually meant good takings at the box office.
Robinson was the first Hollywood star to entertain in France after the invasion of Normandy but because he had allowed his name to be linked with so many causes, inevitably there were those with a Communist tinge. Robinson was named in ”Red Channels“ in connection with 11 Communist front organizations but he carried his case to the House Un-American Activities Committee and eventually won a clean bill of health.
After 28 years of marriage Robinson was sued for divorce in 1955 and his wife was granted an interlocutory divorce decree the next year.
After 28 years as a movie actor and aged 63, Robinson returned to the stage in Middle of the Night and scored
a success. He portrayed an aging widower who married a much younger woman.
Early in 1958, while he was still appearing in the Paddy Chayefsky play, Robinson was married to Jane Bodenheimer,
a 38-year-old dress designer known professionally as Jane Arden.
After his stage success, the actor performed occasionally on television and played featured roles in several other movies. In all he appeared in 40 Broadway plays and as said before appeared in more than 100 films. Among his most recent movies were A Boy Ten Feet Tall, Cheyenne Autumn, The Cincinnati Kid and Sammy Going South. It was while making this picture in 1964 that he suffered a mild heart attack.
Robinson was to have received a special Oscar for his ”outstanding contribution to motion pictures“ at the
Academy Awards ceremony March 27, It would have been his first Oscar.