One of my favorite movies is Ron Howard's "Parenthood". The story of a large dysfunctional family could have turned into a sour tale of sad lives, but instead Howard turned it into a life-affirming joyous story of a family who - despite the hard times - can come together in love and genuine affection. Sadly, the patriarch of that film has died. Jason Robards, the two-time Oscar-winning character actor, died of cancer recently at the age of 78.
Robards was born on July 26, 1922, in Chicago, to Jason Nelson Robards Sr., a prominent actor in his own right who starred in over 170 movies during his prolific career. Jason Jr. later attended Hollywood High School and took drama classes, but took no joy in the theater at that time. At Hollywood High, Robards was on the baseball, football, basketball and track teams - acting was merely a class he had to take.
He originally resented the acting profession, despising the fact that it took his well-known father away to perform plays on the road. He later disagreed with his father's decision to move from the stage to Hollywood, claiming that only the stage work was worth anything to a real actor. But instead of becoming a stage actor, in 1939 when he came of age, young Robards decided to join the Navy and served during the Second World War, earning the Navy Cross for valor, surviving the horrors at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
After the war, however, inspired by the plays he had read while at sea, Robards used the GI Bill to enroll in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and briefly studied acting before spending the next six years working in stock theater. He didn't take the stage until 1951, when he became an understudy and assistant stage manager for "Stalag 17" on Broadway. He later toured with the show in a small role.
But it wasn't until he landed the role of Hickey in Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" that Robards truly came to love the theater and longed to have a steady career of it. To audiences he seemed to come out of nowhere and commanded the stage in the acclaimed revival. O'Neill's characters came easy to Robards, who later won the New York Drama Critics Award for his performance as an alcoholic in another O'Neill production, "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Not to be outdone, in 1958 Robards won a Tony Award for "The Disenchanted." He was a beloved actor to Broadway, and was nominated for eight more Tonys during his illustrious career onstage.
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