Mr. Robertson was one of my favorite actors when I was a child. I’m saddened by his passing.
Robertson, who went on to win an Oscar for his portrayal of a mentally disabled man in “Charly”, died of natural causes Saturday afternoon in Stony Brook, a day after his 88th birthday, according to Evelyn Christel, his secretary of 53 years.
Read more about Mr. Robertson in this NY Times article.
I love Charly, but my all time favorite Cliff Robertson movie was Robert Aldrich’s Too Late the Hero. It was an excellently written and plotted WWII thriller. I was maybe ten or twelve years old when I first saw this movie. My mom alerted me that it was going to be on one evening. She knew I loved war movies and didn’t think I’d ever seen it. I watched it that night. It was a great movie.
I may have to put a hold on it at my library, actually. I haven’t seen it in a while.
Requiescat in pace, Mr. Robertson.
Nocturnal Slacker v2.0 
I also enjoyed Cliff Robertson very much growing up.
I loved everything he was in. Not always directly because of him, but he always did a great job no matter what role he played, good or bad characters or just misguided.
He did a great job in Brainstorm too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
And that was a complex and not too trustworthy type of guy, but he did it so well.
I also loved his role in PT-109 and Too Late The Hero and many of his other war and other movies.
Definitely Cliff Robertson will be missed.
They’re forever young in those films; a form of immortality almost. We’ve lost a lot of good actors over the years. We all gotta’ go sometime, I s’pose. 😦
Robertson was certainly one of the greats. It’s unfortunate that his career was derailed in the late 70s and early 80s because he dared report to authorities that his name had been forged on a check endorsement (it turned out, by a studio executive who’d been embezzling money from his company), and because of that he was blacklisted for several years.
That’s right. Hollywood blacklisted him for having done the right thing and ratting out someone who’d been up to no good. His blacklisting was broken when, after several years mysteriously out of the public eye, he was hired as AT&T’s spokesman, and papers began running stories inquiring as to why he’d gone missing for so long. Once reporters started asking questions of agents and studio executives, they soon discovered why, and began reporting what had happened/ After that the barrier that stood against Robertson crumbled and he was hired as a movie actor again (IIRC in Brainstorm).
Hollywood is a vindictive place with little sense of shame and without even a care for its own welfare — these people targeted Robertson, who’d reported a crime, rather than the criminal himself, whom they almost immediately forgave for his fraud.
Interesting. I didn’t know about his blacklisting. For more info on that see –> David McClintick, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street, William Morrow and Company, 1982.
RIP Uncle Ben, you will be missed.
Hi Dan!
I like your review blog –> Dan The Man’s Movie Reviews Good stuff. I’ll be stopping by for a read every so often. 🙂
Thanks for reading/commenting.
~Eric