Background
Blake, Robert was born on September 18, 1933 in Nutley, New Jersey.
Blake, Robert was born on September 18, 1933 in Nutley, New Jersey.
As Mickey Gubitosi, then as Bobby Blake, the wide-eyed boy, he was in I Love You Again (40, W. S. Van Dyke II); Andy Hardy’s Double Life (42, George B. Seitz); Slightly Dangerous (43, Wesley Buggies); The Big Noise (44, Malcolm St. Clair); The Woman in the Window (44, Fritz Lang); Dakota (45, Joseph Kane); Pillow to Post (45, Vin-cent Sherman); The Horn Blows at Midnight (45, Raoul Walsh); as the young John Garfield in Humoresque (47, jean Neguleseo); The Return of Rin Tin Tin (47, Max Nosseck); a Mexican kid in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (47. John Huston); The Black Rose (50, Henry Hathaway); Apache War Smoke (52, Harold F. Kress); Treasure of the Golden Condor (53, Delmer Daves); The Rack (56, Arnold Laven).
But then, in his early twenties, he shifted his name to “Robert” and gradually forged an adult career that climaxed in the TV series Baretta (75-78), for which he won an Emmy: Rumble on the Docks (56, Fred F. Sears); The Tijuana Story (57, Leslie Kardos); The Beast of Budapest (58, Harmon Jones); Revolt in the Big House (58, R. G. Springsteen); Battle Flame (59, Springsteen); The Puiyile Gang (60, Frank McDonald); Town Without Pity (61, Gottfried Reinhardt); The Connection (61, Shirley Clarke); PT 109 (63, Leslie Martinson); The Greatest Ston/ Ever Told (65, George Stevens); This Property Is Condemned (66, Svdney Pollack); outstanding, with Scott Milson, in In Cold Blood (67, Richard Brooks); Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (69, Abraham Polonsky); a boxer in Ripped Off (71, Franco Prosperi); a stock-car racer in Cooky (72, Leonard Horn); the smart cop in Electra Glide in Blue (73, James William Guercio); Busting (74, Peter Hyams); a trucker who takes on Dyan Cannon in Coast to Coast (80, Joseph Sargent); Second-Hand Hearts (81, Hal Ashby); acting in and producing a TV version of Of Mice and Men (81, Reza Badiyi); as Jimmy Hof fa on TV in Blood Feud (83, Mike Newell); Money Train (95, Joseph Ruben).
And then, in 2001, bizarre melodrama: a wife, a restaurant, a car, shots in the night. And they say that David Lynch is fanciful.
He was a kid in Western serials—notably the Red Ryder pictures. He was one of the most lustrous children of the 1940s, a kid with a nitrate smile. And he would become a kind of great actor—half Method, half himself—as well as a TV fixture, whether he was being a real little toughie or a rather self-pitying fellow mooning to Jolmny Carson. He doesn’t work much now, but never forget that he was the best thing in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (97), a haunted face gazing out of the darkness.
Married Sondra Kerry (divorced). 2 children.