Edward G. Robinson

At 79 years old, Edward G. Robinson has this physical status:

He began his acting career in the Yiddish Theatre District in 1913, he made his Broadway debut in 1915. He made his film debut in Arms and the Woman (1916).

In 1923, he made his named debut as E.G. Robinson in the silent film, The Bright Shawl.

He played a snarling gangster in the 1927 Broadway police/crime drama The Racket, which led to his being cast in similar film roles, beginning with The Hole in the Wall (1929) with Claudette Colbert for Paramount.

One of many actors who saw their careers flourish rather than falter in the new sound film era, he made only three films prior to 1930, but left his stage career that year and made 14 films between 1930 and 1932.

Robinson went to Universal for Night Ride (1930) and MGM for A Lady to Love (1930) directed by Victor Sjöström. At Universal he was in Outside the Law and East Is West (both 1930), then he did The Widow from Chicago (1931) at First National.

At this point, Robinson was becoming an established film actor. What began his rise to stardom was an acclaimed performance as the gangster Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello in Little Caesar (1931) at Warner Bros.

Robinson signed a long-term contract with Warners Bros., casting him in another gangster film, Smart Money (1931), his only movie with James Cagney. He was reunited with Mervyn LeRoy, director of Little Caesar, in Five Star Final (1931), playing a journalist, and played a Tong gangster in The Hatchet Man (1932).

Robinson made a third film with LeRoy, Two Seconds (1932) then did a melodrama directed by Howard Hawks, Tiger Shark (1932).

Warners tried him in a biopic, Silver Dollar (1932), where Robinson played Horace Tabor, a comedy, The Little Giant (1933) and a romance, I Loved a Woman (1933).

Robinson was then in Dark Hazard (1934), and The Man with Two Faces (1934).

He went to Columbia for The Whole Town's Talking (1935), a comedy directed by John Ford. Sam Goldwyn borrowed him for Barbary Coast (1935), again directed by Hawks.

Back at Warners he did Bullets or Ballots (1936) then he went to Britain for Thunder in the City (1937). He made Kid Galahad (1937) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. MGM borrowed him for The Last Gangster (1937) then he did a comedy A Slight Case of Murder (1938). Again with Bogart in a supporting role, he was in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) then he was borrowed by Columbia for I Am the Law (1938).

At the time World War II broke out in Europe, he played an FBI agent in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the first American film which portrayed Nazism as a threat to the United States.

He volunteered for military service in June 1942 but was disqualified due to his age which was 48, although he became an active and vocal critic of fascism and Nazism during that period.

MGM borrowed him for Blackmail, (1939). Then to avoid being typecast he played the biomedical scientist and Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and played Paul Julius Reuter in A Dispatch from Reuter's (1940). Both films were biographies of prominent Jewish public figures. In between, he and Bogart starred in Brother Orchid (1940).

Robinson was teamed up with John Garfield in The Sea Wolf (1941) and George Raft in Manpower (1941). He went to MGM for Unholy Partners (1942) and made a comedy Larceny, Inc. (1942).

Robinson was one of several stars in Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943).

He did war films: Destroyer (1943) at Columbia, and Tampico (1944) at Fox. At Paramount he was in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck where his riveting soliloquy on insurance actuarial tables (written by Raymond Chandler) is considered a career showstopper, and at Columbia he was in Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944). He then performed with Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945) where he played a criminal painter.

At MGM he was in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), and then Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946), with Welles and Loretta Young. Robinson followed it with another thriller, The Red House (1947), and starred in an adaptation of All My Sons (1948).

Robinson appeared for director John Huston as the gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (1948), the last of five films which he made with Humphrey Bogart and the only one in which Bogart did not play a supporting role. Around the same time, he was cast in starring roles for Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) and House of Strangers (1949).

Robinson found it hard to get work after his greylisting. He starred in low budget films: Actors and Sin (1952), Vice Squad (1953) with brief appearances by second-billed Paulette Goddard, Big Leaguer (1953) with Vera-Ellen, The Glass Web (1953) with John Forsythe, Black Tuesday (1954) with Peter Graves, The Violent Men (1955) with Glenn Ford and Barbara Stanwyck, the well-received Tight Spot (1955) with Ginger Rogers and Brian Keith, A Bullet for Joey (1955) with George Raft, Illegal (1955) with Nina Foch, and Hell on Frisco Bay (1956) with Alan Ladd.

His career's rehabilitation received a boost in 1954, when the anti-communist film director Cecil B. DeMille cast him as the traitorous Dathan in The Ten Commandments. The film was released in 1956, as was his psychological thriller Nightmare. After a subsequent short absence from the screen, Robinson's film career—augmented by an increasing number of television roles—restarted in 1958/59, when he was second-billed after Frank Sinatra in the 1959 release A Hole in the Head.

Robinson went to Europe for Seven Thieves (1960). He had support roles in My Geisha (1962), Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), Sammy Going South (1963), The Prize (1963), Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), Good Neighbor Sam (1964), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and The Outrage (1964).

He was second-billed under Steve McQueen with his name above the title in The Cincinnati Kid (1965; McQueen had idolized Robinson while growing up and opted for him when Spencer Tracy insisted on top billing for the same role), and was top billed in The Blonde from Peking. He also appeared in Grand Slam (1967) starring Janet Leigh and Klaus Kinski.

Robinson was originally cast in the role of Dr. Zaius in Planet Of The Apes (1968) and he even went so far as to film a screen test with Charlton Heston. However, Robinson dropped out of the project before its production began due to heart problems and concerns over the long hours which he would have needed to spend under the heavy ape makeup. He was replaced by Maurice Evans.

His later appearances included The Biggest Bundle of Them All (1968) starring Robert Wagner and Raquel Welch, Never a Dull Moment (1968) with Dick Van Dyke, It's Your Move (1968), Mackenna's Gold (1969) starring Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif, and the Night Gallery episode “The Messiah on Mott Street" (1971).

The last scene which Robinson filmed was a euthanasia sequence, with his friend and co-star Charlton Heston, in the science fiction film Soylent Green (1973); he died only twelve days later.

Heston, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, presented Robinson with its annual award in 1969, "in recognition of his pioneering work in organizing the union, his service during World War II, and his 'outstanding achievement in fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession.'": 124

Robinson was never nominated for an Academy Award, but in 1973 he was awarded an honorary Oscar in recognition that he had "achieved greatness as a player, a patron of the arts and a dedicated citizen ... in sum, a Renaissance man". He had been notified of the honor, but he died two months before the award ceremony took place, so the award was accepted by his widow, Jane Robinson.

From 1937 to 1942, Robinson starred as Steve Wilson, editor of the Illustrated Press, in the newspaper drama Big Town. He also portrayed hardboiled detective Sam Spade for a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. During the 1940s he also performed on CBS Radio's "Cadena de las Américas" network broadcasts to South America in collaboration with Nelson Rockefeller's cultural diplomacy program at the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

Source