Robert Downey Sr.
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Robert Downey Sr. (born Robert John Elias Jr. in 1937) is an actor, writer and film director.
By the age of 22, Downey had served in the Army, played minor league baseball, become a Golden Gloves champion and an Off-Off-Broadway playwright. In 1961, working with the film editor Fred von Bernewitz, he began writing and directing low-budget 16mm films which gained an underground following, beginning with Ball's Bluff (1961), a fantasy short about a Civil War soldier who awakens in Central Park in 1961.
Downey is best known as the director and writer of the cult classic feature film Putney Swope, a biting satire on the New York Madison Avenue advertising world.
He moved into big-budget filmmaking with the surreal Greaser's Palace (1972), compared to The Greatest Story Ever Told by Vincent Canby in a New York Times review:
- Greaser's Palace does to vulgar humor what the George Stevens film did to Christianity: it embraces it with awe and far too many technical resources. The film, which opened yesterday at the Festival Theater, is the gospel according to Downey, set in a Wild West ruled by a tyrant named Seaweedhead Greaser, who collects taxes, keep his mother and his favorite mariachi band in cages and suffers the constipation of the damned. The savior, who arrives by parachute, is a modest young man in a 1940ish zoot suit who simply wants to get to Jerusalem to become an actor-singer. "It's written," he says, "that the agent Morris awaits me." En route he finds himself working miracles ("If ya feel, ya heal"), some of which aren't 100 per cent effective. He "cures" one old man who throws away his crutches and announces triumphantly: "I can crawl again! I can crawl again!" The savior rather enjoys walking on water and is an immense success with his nightclub act, which concludes when he holds up his two bleeding hands, although the agent Morris thinks it's dreadful. In poor taste, really. He's just getting started on a proper show biz career when his father shows up and tells him it's time to go. "I don't want to," he says. "I think I've found myself and I really don't trust you." [1]
Downey is the father of actor Robert Downey Jr. and the actress-writer Allyson Downey, both children from his first marriage to actress Elsie Downey. They were divorced in 1975. Downey Sr.'s second marriage, to the actress-writer Laura Ernst, ended with her 1994 death from amyotropic lateral sclerosis. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Rosemary Rogers, whom he married in 1998.
His most recent film was Rittenhouse Square (2005), a documentary capturing life in a Philadelphia park.
