Edward G. Robinson
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Edward G. Robinson | |
Edward G. Robinson The image above is a candidate for speedy deletion. It will be deleted on 2007-04-04. |
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Birth name | Emanuel Goldenberg |
Born | December 12, 1893 Bucharest, Romania |
Died | January 26, 1973 (aged 79) Hollywood, Los Angeles, California |
Edward Goldenberg Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg, Yiddish: ×¢×ž× ×•×ל ×’×•×œ×“× ×‘×¨×’; December 12, 1893 – January 26, 1973) was an American stage and film actor of Romanian origin.
Born to an Yiddish-speaking Jewish family in Bucharest, he emigrated with his family to New York City in 1903. He attended Townsend Harris High School and then City College of New York, but an interest in acting led to him winning an American Academy of Dramatic Arts scholarship, after which he changed his name to Edward G. Robinson (the G. signifying his original last name). He began his acting career in 1913 and made his Broadway debut in 1915. He made his film debut in a minor and uncredited role in 1916; in 1923 he made his named debut as E. G. Robinson in The Bright Shawl. One of many actors who saw his career flourish in the new sound film era rather than falter, he made only three films prior to 1930 but left his stage career that year and made fourteen films in 1930-32. He married the actress Gladys Lloyd in 1927 and the couple had one son, Manny Robinson (1933-1974).
Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni were cousins to Charles M. Fritz, who was an actor and manager of The Little Red Theater in Northport, Long Island, New York during the depression.[citation needed]
An acclaimed performance as the gangster Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1931) led to him being typecast as a 'tough guy' for much of his early career in works such as Five Star Final (1931), Smart Money (1931; his only movie with James Cagney), Tiger Shark (1932), Kid Galahad (1937) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and A Slight Case of Murder (1938). In the 1940s, after a good performance in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), he expanded into edgy psychological dramas including Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1945) and Scarlet Street (1945); but he continued to portray gangsters such as Johnny Rocco in John Huston's classic Key Largo (1948), the last of five films he made with Humphrey Bogart.
On three occasions in 1950 and 1952 he was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and was threatened with blacklisting.[1] Robinson became frightened and took steps to clear his name, such as having a representative go through his check stubs to ensure that none had been issued to subversive organizations.[2] He reluctantly gave names of communist sympathizers and his own name was cleared, but thereafter he received smaller and less frequent roles. Still, anti-communist director Cecil B. DeMille cast him in The Ten Commandments in 1956.
Robinson built up a significant art collection. In 1956, he sold it to Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos in order to raise cash needed for his divorce settlement with Gladys Lloyd. That same year he returned to Broadway in Middle of the Night.
After DeMille brought Robinson back into movies, his most notable roles occurred in A Hole in the Head (1959) opposite Frank Sinatra and The Cincinnati Kid (1965), which showcased Robinson alongside Steve McQueen. Director Peter Bogdanovich was considered as a possible director for The Godfather in 1972, but turned it down, later remarking that he would have cast Robinson in the role ultimately played by Marlon Brando. Robinson indeed tried to talk his way into the part (which was how he had won the role of Little Caesar forty years earlier), but Francis Coppola decided on Brando instead, over the initial objections of the studio.
Robinson was popular in the 1930s and '40s and was able to avoid many flops over a career of over 90 films spanning 50 years. His last scene was a suicide sequence in the science fiction cult classic Soylent Green (1973) in which he dies in a euthanasia clinic while watching nature films on a wall-sized screen.
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".[citation needed] He died from cancer at the age of 79 two months before the award ceremony.
Edward G. Robinson is interred in a crypt in the family mausoleum at Beth-El Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, New York.
[edit] Trivia
- The voice of Chief Wiggum on The Simpsons is Hank Azaria's imitation of Robinson, which is used as a joke several times in the show. In the episode "Homer Loves Flanders", Chief Wiggum says contemptuously, ""Where's your Messiah now, Flanders?" which is a parody of one of Edward G. Robinson's lines in The Ten Commandments. In a scene in the episode "Bart Gets an Elephant", Chief Wiggum nonchalantly answers distress phone calls and says sarcastically "Yeah, right, and I'm Edward G. Robinson!" to one caller. In the episode "The Day the Violence Died", Roger Meyers points out that Chief Wiggum is an animated counterpart of Edward G. Robinson (Wiggum, in the court at the time, looks at Meyers when he says this).
- On the 1960s cartoon "Courageous Cat & Minute Mouse", a character called "The Frog", a cigar-chomping amphibian, spoke in the gangster style of Edward G. Robinson.[citation needed]
- A character bearing his likeness, an earlier version of the gangster character Rocky, was featured in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
- George, one of the Gremlins in the Gremlins 2 movie, is based on Robinson.[citation needed]
- The character Brandon "Big Boss" Babel from the cartoon series C.O.P.S. is loosely based on Robinson's gangster portrayals.
- The Gerry Anderson series Dick Spanner features a villain named Edgar G. Hobson in "The Case Of The Maltese Parrot". The character is played as a Robinson-style character, down to his "See?" catchphrase.
- Hip-Hop legend Nas imitates Robinson's voice on his track, "Who Killed It?" from his latest album, Hip-Hop is Dead.[citation needed]
- In the episode "Play It Again, Seymour" of the TV series Quantum Leap, Dr. Sam Beckett mimics Robinson saying, "Don't even think about it, you mug" only to be corrected by Al "It's not a Humphrey Bogart line!" (Sam had leaped into a man who resembled Bogart.)
- In Robinson's final film, Soylent Green, he plays a depressed and disillusioned man who commits suicide to escape from the apocalyptic future world he lives in; his death scene features him speaking with co-star Charlton Heston whose character weeps silently as he sees Robinson's photos of a pre-destroyed Earth. The tears were real; Charlton was at that time the only one who knew of Robinson's terminal cancer. Indeed, Robinson died less than a month later.
[edit] Filmography
- Arms and the Woman (1916)
- The Bright Shawl (1923)
- The Hole in the Wall (1929)
- Warner Bros. Jubilee Dinner (1930) (short subject)
- Night Ride (1930)
- A Lady to Love (1930)
- Outside the Law (1930)
- East Is West (1930)
- The Widow from Chicago (1930)
- How I Play Golf by Bobby Jones No. 10: Trouble Shots (1931) (short subject)
- Little Caesar (1931)
- The Slippery Pearls (1931) (short subject)
- Smart Money (1931)
- Five Star Final (1931)
- The Hatchet Man (1932)
- Two Seconds (1932)
- Tiger Shark (1932)
- Silver Dollar (1932)
- The Little Giant (1933)
- I Loved a Woman (1933)
- Dark Hazard (1934)
- The Man with Two Faces (1934)
- The Whole Town's Talking (1935)
- Barbary Coast (1935)
- Bullets or Ballots (1936)
- Thunder in the City (1937)
- Kid Galahad (1937)
- The Last Gangster (1937)
- A Slight Case of Murder (1938)
- The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938)
- I Am the Law (1938)
- Verdensberomtheder i Kobenhavn (1939) (documentary)
- A Day at Santa Anita (1939) (short subject)
- Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939)
- Blackmail (1939)
- Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940)
- Brother Orchid (1940)
- A Dispatch from Reuters (1940)
- The Sea Wolf (1941)
- Manpower (1941)
- Polo with the Stars (1941) (short subject)
- Unholy Partners (1941)
- Larceny, Inc. (1942)
- Tales of Manhattan (1942)
- Moscow Strikes Back (1942) (documentary) (narrator)
- Magic Bullets (1943) (short subject) (narrator)
- Destroyer (1943)
- Flesh and Fantasy (1943)
- Tampico (1944)
- Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944)
- Double Indemnity (1944)
- The Woman in the Window (1945)
- Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945)
- Scarlet Street (1945)
- American Creed (1946) (short subject)
- Journey Together (1946)
- The Stranger (1946)
- The Red House (1947)
- All My Sons (1948)
- Key Largo (1948)
- Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)
- House of Strangers (1949)
- It's a Great Feeling (1949) (Cameo)
- Operation X (1950)
- Actors and Sin (1952)
- Vice Squad (1953)
- Big Leaguer (1953)
- The Glass Web (1953)
- Black Tuesday (1954)
- Hell on Frisco Bay (1955)
- The Violent Men (1955)
- Tight Spot (1955)
- A Bullet for Joey (1955)
- Illegal (1955)
- Nightmare (1956)
- The Ten Commandments (1956)
- The Heart of Show Business (1957) (short subject) (narrator)
- A Hole in the Head (1959)
- Seven Thieves (1960)
- Pepe (1960) (Cameo)
- My Geisha (1962)
- Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)
- A Boy Ten Feet Tall (1963)
- The Prize (1963)
- Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) (Cameo)
- Good Neighbor Sam (1964)
- Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
- The Outrage (1964)
- The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
- All About People (1967) (short subject) (narrator)
- Grand Slam (1967)
- The Blonde from Peking (1967)
- Operation St. Peter's (1967)
- The Biggest Bundle of Them All (1968)
- Never a Dull Moment (1968)
- It's Your Move (1969)
- Mackenna's Gold (1969)
- Song of Norway (1970)
- Mooch Goes to Hollywood (1971) (Cameo)
- Neither by Day Nor by Night (1972)
- Soylent Green (1973)
[edit] References
- ^ Sabin, Arthur J. In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday, p. 35. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
- ^ ibid.; Bud and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America, p. 113. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
[edit] External links
- Edward G. Robinson at the Internet Movie Database
- Edward G. Robinson at the TCM Movie Database
- Edward G. Robinson at the Internet Broadway Database
Persondata | |
---|---|
NAME | Robinson, Edward Goldenberg |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Goldenberg, Emanuel; ×¢×ž× ×•×ל ×’×•×œ×“× ×‘×¨×’ (Yiddish) |
SHORT DESCRIPTION | Romanian-American film actor |
DATE OF BIRTH | February 12, 1893 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Bucharest, Romania |
DATE OF DEATH | January 26, 1973 |
PLACE OF DEATH | Hollywood, Los Angeles, California |
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