Robert Stack

The First Kiss and the Firing Ranges

Robert Stack gave his first on-screen kiss to Deanna Durbin in 1939. He was twenty years old, and that moment in First Love was enough to get audiences to accept him as Hollywood's new leading man. But his destiny did not lie in the studio romantic comedies.

Before he ever set foot on a movie set, he was already an elite athlete. He excelled at polo and was a skeet shooting champion before he came of age. That physical discipline carried into his acting, because he always kept a rigid posture and an unwavering gaze fixed on the target.

Robert Stack was not a method actor.

During World War II, he served as an aerial gunnery instructor in the Navy. When he returned to Los Angeles, movies had changed. Studios were looking for square-jawed men with voices that didn't waver in the face of danger.

In 1954, he appeared in The High and the Mighty alongside John Wayne. Two years later, he got his big break in the melodrama Written on the Wind. That role as a tormented alcoholic earned him an Oscar nomination and proved there were dark nuances behind his granite facade.

Eliot Ness's Badge and the Roar of the Thompson

Massive success didn't come from the movie theaters but from the small screen. In 1959, he accepted the role of Eliot Ness in the series The Untouchables. It was a risky decision, since television was still considered a lesser medium for movie stars.

And the gamble paid off.

The series depicted the fight against Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Stack played Ness with a restraint that made the producers nervous. But that lack of emotion was exactly what the character needed to confront the mob in every episode.

In 1960, he won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for this role. The show ran for four seasons, and his face became the symbol of unbending law in millions of homes. But typecasting began to take its toll toward the end of the 1960s.

Tough-guy roles became repetitive. So Stack chose to step away from the spotlight for short stretches to hunt and play golf on the pro circuit. He wasn't interested in fame if the price was playing the same cop over and over.

The Blue Raincoat and the Turn Toward Comedy

Few expected such a serious man to make people laugh. In 1980, the directors of Airplane! invited him to spoof his own image. He agreed to play Captain Rex Kramer on the condition that he could deliver the most absurd lines with complete seriousness.

Audiences discovered a brilliant comic who didn't need to change his expression to get big laughs.

In 1987, his career entered an unexpected third act. He began hosting Unsolved Mysteries. His deep voice and his presence in a blue trench coat in dark alleys became a ratings phenomenon that lasted fifteen years.

The show helped solve more than a thousand real cases involving crimes and disappearances. Stack took the job very seriously and received letters from viewers who believed he was a private detective capable of catching fugitives.

He appeared in the war comedy 1941 under the direction of Steven Spielberg. In that film, he played General Stilwell and held his own against far more theatrical actors. Stack knew that in movies, sometimes less is more.

Robert Stack died at his home in Beverly Hills on May 14, 2003.

He was 84 years old when heart failure ended his life after months of treatment for prostate cancer. His final film appearance was lending his voice to the animated movie Hercules: Zero to Hero in 1999.