1919-2003 Actor
1919:
1939:
1942:
1953:
1954:
1956:
1959:
1979:
1980:
1988:
1991:
2003:
filmography
main site
key dates
Born on 13 January in Los Angeles, California, USA
Appears in First Love
Appears in To Be or Not to Be. World War 2 put the brakes on his career
Appears in first 3-D feature, Bwana Devil
Appears in The High and the Mighty
Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Written on the Wind. Marries Rosemarie Stack. 2 children
In his best remembered role, plays Eliot Ness on TV in The Untouchables until 1963. Earns him an Emmy in its first season
Appears in 1941
Appears in Airplane!
Host of TV's Unsolved Mysteries
Stars in the TV movie The Return of Eliot Ness
Dies of a heart attack on 14 May Beverly Hills, California, USA
Childen:Father of Charles Stack and actress Elizabeth Stack
links
Robert Stack (1999)
-
b. Charles Langford Modini Stack
-
The American cinema of action has always
depended upon the ability of certain actors to
express moral energy—conscience and intelligence—in motion, without the elaborate benefit
of character study or dialogue. It has persistently
seen intellectual and spiritual personality in violent activity: force of arms equals moral integrity.
James Stewart in the films of Anthony Mann is a
fine example. But America has had a clutch of
actors with this power. Although he was never
identified with evidently important parts,
Stack's drawn face brought urgency and tension to
his films. Part of his presence was the capacity for
persuading us that a film can turn on a brief,
intense physical demonstration. Watch his bleak
blue eyes closely and you may begin to understand
the depth of American cinema.
He made only a few films before service in the
navy: giving Deanna Durbin her first screen kiss
in First Love (39, Henry Koster); The Mortal
Storm (40, Frank Borzage); A Little Bit of Heaven
(40, Andrew Marton); Badlands of Dakota (41,
Alfred E. Green); Men of Texas (42, Ray Enright);
To Be or Not to Be (42, Ernst Lubitsch) as the Polish flier "able to drop three tons of dynamite in
two minutes"; and Eagle Squadron (42, Arthur
Lubin). After the war, he had ten years as a leading actor, though rarely in big films: A Date with Judy (48, Richard Thorpe); Miss Tatlock's Millions
(48, Richard Haydn); Fighter Squadron (48,
Raoul Walsh); Mr. Music (50, Haydn); My Outlaw Brother (51, Elliott Nugent); The Bullfighter and
the Lady (51, Budd Boetticher); Sabre Jet (53,
Louis King); Bwana Devil (53, Arch Oboler);
Conquest of Cochise (53, William Castle); The Iron Glove (54, Castle); The High and the Mighty (54, William Wellman); marvelously shabby as the masquerading agent in House of Baamboo
(55, Samuel Fuller); Good Morning, Miss Dove
(55, Koster); and Great Day in the Morning (56, Jacques Tourneur).
Then came two Douglas Sirk films•Written on the Wind (56) and The Tarnished Angels (57). All
of Stack's incisiveness was confounded by Sirk's
use of the actor as a man desperate to stave off
insecurity. In the first, he is a wealthy oil man who
fears his own impotence, and in the second, the
flier who risks death for the woman he shamed by
winning at dice and for the son who may not be his
own. Sirk's critical portrait of the American hero
would not have been as penetrating without so
monolithic a figure as Stack—a hard jaw getting
the jitters. He was never so firm again in movies.
The Gift of Love (58, Jean Negulesco); as John Paul Jones (59, John Farrow); and as Eliot Ness,
the Chicago detective, in The Scarface Mob (59,
Phil Karlson). That last film was a pilot for the TV
series The Untouchables, on which for many years
Stack blasted or arrested the guest stars. With that
meal ticket, he made fewer movies: excellent as
the distraught father in The Last Voyage (60, Andrew Stone); The Caretakers (63, Hal Bartlett); Is Paris Burning (66, Rene Clement);
The Peking Medallion (67, James Hill); Le Soleil des Voyous (67, Jean Delannoy); Storia di una Donna (69, Leonardo Bercovici); and Un Second Souffle (78, Gerard Blain).
He was in 1941 (79, Steven Spielberg); Airplane! (80, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker); Uncommon Valor (83, Ted Kotcheff); Big Trouble (84, John Cassavetes); Midas Valley (85, Gus Trikonis); Dangerous Curves (88, David Lewis); Caddyshack II (88, Allan Arkush);
Plain Clothes (88, Martha Coolidge); and Joe Versus the Volcano (90, John Patrick Shanley).
In the years before his death, he had been the enthusiast
host of TVs Unsolved Mysteries.
He died at the age of 84 of a heart attack in Beverly Hills. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer the year before his death.
