Jason Robards

Jason Robards (born July 26, 1922, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 26, 2000, Bridgeport, Connecticut) was an American stage and film actor who was known for his intense, introspective performances and who was widely regarded as the foremost interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Because of the bitterness and disillusionment expressed by his father, onetime stage and film leading man Jason Robards, Sr. (1892–1963), the younger Robards avoided acting in his youth. He served in the U.S. Navy as a radioman during the years 1940–46; he witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and saw action in the Pacific. It was during his military service that he decided to pursue acting. Upon his discharge, he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he studied with Uta Hagen. Billed as Jason Robards, Jr., he made his first professional New York stage appearance in 1947, in a children’s theatre production of Jack and the Beanstalk. Supplementing his acting income by working as a cab driver and a schoolteacher, he spent several years playing small roles onstage and in radio and television before he won a lead role in the 1953 Off-Broadway production American Gothic.

Full stardom came Robards’s way in 1956 when he played the self-delusional traveling salesman Hickey in the Off-Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. That same year, he created the role of sensitive young alcoholic Jamie Tyrone, O’Neill’s alter ego, in Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway; for his performance, Robards earned the first of numerous Tony Award nominations. He subsequently starred in such O’Neill works as Hughie, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and A Touch of the Poet—all of which, like Iceman and Long Day’s Journey, were directed by José Quintero.

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Robards received a Tony Award for his performance in Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted (1958). He received further acclaim for his work in Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1960). He also played leading roles in the original Broadway productions of A Thousand Clowns (1962) and Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (1964) as well as in revivals of Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl (1972), O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (1988), and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1994).

His first film appearance was in The Journey (1959). Robards was occasionally criticized for delivering overly theatrical screen performances, especially when he repeated his stage roles in the movie versions of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) and A Thousand Clowns (1965). He appeared in such negligible films as The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), in which he was singularly miscast as Al Capone, and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971). His more significant movies from this time included Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1968), William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). Robards later earned two consecutive Academy Awards for his subtle, well-modulated performances as The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men (1976) and detective novelist Dashiell Hammett in Julia (1977). He received a third Oscar nomination for his interpretation of yet another “real-life” character, Howard Hughes, in Melvin and Howard (1980). Robards’s later films included Philadelphia (1993), A Thousand Acres (1997), and Magnolia (1999).

Robards continued to divide his time between stage, film, and television assignments throughout the 1990s, earning an Emmy Award for his performance as lawyer Henry Drummond in the 1988 TV-movie version of Inherit the Wind. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1997 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 1999. His sons Jason Robards III and Sam Robards also pursued acting careers. The third of Robards’s four wives was actress Lauren Bacall.