Andrew Robinson

The man who got threats for being too real

Andrew Robinson received real death threats in 1971. That year he played Scorpio in Dirty Harry, and his performance was so slimy that audiences couldn't separate fiction from reality. Don Siegel asked him to be an absolute maniac, and the actor more than delivered.

And the public believed him.

After the premiere, he had to hire a security service and change his phone number. The Hollywood film industry reacted strangely to his talent. Instead of being showered with lead role offers, casting directors only called him to play psychopaths and disturbed men.

He spent several years trying to shake off that stigma. Robinson trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and his range was much broader than that of a simple vacant-eyed killer. But the money didn't always come in, so he took jobs on minor TV series during the 1970s.

Visceral horror and a refuge in space

In 1987, he landed a different kind of role in Hellraiser. He played Larry Cotton in a production where latex and fake blood dominated every shooting day. It was a physical, exhausting shoot under Clive Barker's direction. The movie grossed 14 million dollars in its initial U.S. release on a very tight budget.

But the industry is cruel.

Despite appearing in major genre hits, Robinson never sought the fame of magazine covers. In 1993, he accepted the role of Elim Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The character was a Cardassian tailor hiding a past as a spy, and Robinson gave him an ambiguity that wasn't written into the original script.

He spent seven years under layers of silicone and facial prosthetics. The makeup process took three hours every morning before filming began. Almost no one recognized his face off the set during that entire time.

Seven seasons and thirty-seven episodes later, Garak had become the supporting character most valued by franchise fans. In 2000, Robinson even wrote a novel about the character, titled A Stitch in Time.

Teaching and the role in the shadows

Directing started to interest him more than being in front of the camera. In the 1990s, he directed episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Judging Amy. He preferred control of the set and building the narrative from the director's chair. Because acting sometimes felt like too heavy a psychological burden.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2015, he published his memoir, titled Stepping into the Light. In the book, he details his childhood troubles and how theater served as therapy for him before he made it to the movies. There's no ornamentation in his prose. He recounts failures with the same matter-of-factness as his box office hits.

He has been teaching for years at the University of Southern California (USC). There he works as an acting professor and runs the Master of Fine Arts program. In 2024, his seminars had a waiting list of several semesters for new drama students. The hardcover edition of his book has 320 pages and is sold mainly in specialty bookstores in Los Angeles.