ROBERT BLAKE

(18 September 1933 - 9 March 2023)

The American actor Robert Blake, who has died at the age of 89 from heart disease, had an exceptionally long career from childhood to old age. However, during his sixty-year career nothing was more exceptional than his own private life. Blake married the actress Sondra Kerr in 1961 and they had two children, Noah and Delinah, but divorced in 1983. In 1999 Blake was wed to a nine-times married woman, Bonnie Lee Bakley, who had also dated Brando’s son Christian, became pregnant and was later found murdered. The fact that Blake had been a drug addict and pusher etched another very black mark on his life, although it didn’t seem to affect his career.

Robert Blake was born Michael James Vijencio Gubitosi in New Jersey to Italian-American parents, Giacomo Gubitosi, who worked for a cannery firm, and his wife Elizabeth. Blake’s parents had a song and dance act in the 1930s and their three children also performed as The Three Little Hillbillies. When they moved to LA, the kids appeared in films as extras. It wasn’t a happy time for Blake who was abused by his mother and father (who committed suicide when Blake was 23), so he ran away from home.

First known in films as Mickey Gubitosi, Blake worked at MGM from 1939 and appeared in Hal Roach’s Our Gang (The Little Rascals) series of 220 short comedies all cast with child actors that ran from 1922 to 1944. Then Blake started a three-year stint as Little Beaver in over 20 films in Republic’s Red Ryder series of second-feature Westerns. After his childhood career, Blake was cast in more adult movies such as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) with Humphrey Bogart, Black Hand (1950) with Gene Kelly, and The Black Rose (1950) with Tyrone Power.

After he left the US Army in 1954, Blake had no job prospects and turned to drug addiction and became a dealer. He then took acting classes and started a flourishing film and TV career, under the name of Robert Blake. He did The Purple Gang with Barry Sullivan, Pork Chop Hill with Gregory Peck, Town Without Pity with Kirk Douglas, PT 109 with Cliff Robertson and George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told, as Simon the Zealot. The films got better still with Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s examination of the real-life killer Perry Smith, and it boasted two Academy Award nominations. Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here with Robert Redford followed, and then Blake starred as a motorcycle cop in Electra Glide in Blue (1973) and was nominated for a Golden Globe.

He also had a thriving career on television from 1952, mainly in Western series, and in 1975 started on over eighty episodes of Baretta, playing the title role of a plainclothes detective, for which he won an Emmy. It was arguably his best work as an actor.

In 2004 Blake was charged with the murder of Bakley, but was acquitted for lack of evidence. When Bakley’s children accused Blake of their mother's demise he was found liable for her wrongful death and ordered to pay $30 million which bankrupted him, although the fine was later reduced to $15 million. In 2017 Blake married Pamela Hudak but they divorced a year later.

MICHAEL DARVELL