Robert Blake

Robert Blake's parents were a song and dance performing team who incorporated their children into their act, and they hit the jackpot with little Mickey Gubitosi, as he was then called. His precocious stage demeanor earned the boy his first film role at age five, in Bridal Suite with Robert Young, and soon he was a regular in the "Our Gang" movies, known in television reruns as the "Little Rascals". As a teenager, Blake played "Little Beaver" in 23 "Red Ryder" feature films, between 1944's Tucson Raiders with Gabby Hayes and 1947's Marshall of Cripple Creek with Allan Lane. Blake claims he was severely abused as a child, physically, sexually, and emotionally. He said that his parents "locked me in a closet and left me there all day long", and that they "made me eat on the floor like a dog". He was expelled from five schools, and was drafted into the military as a teen. After his Army stint, Blake returned to Hollywood, where he worked as an actor and stuntman. He says that attending acting classes, even after his early experience as an actor, turned his life around. Blake worked his way back up from small roles to important ones; he played a rapist/soldier in Town without Pity with Kirk Douglas. He starred in Truman Capote's chilling In Cold Blood, as a loser destined for violence. In the 1969 Robert Redford western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, Blake was Willie Boy. While filming The Greatest Story Ever Told (with Max von Sydow as Jesus and Blake as the disciple Simon), he says he had a passionate affair with co-star Shelley Winters. There is little reason to doubt this, but Blake was miffed when he was not mentioned in her tell-all autobiography. At some point (his official biography says simply "before Baretta") he was addicted to heroin for several years, and he has also abused uppers and downers. He was labeled a perfectionist and difficult to work with, which has been cited as the reason he began to work more in television than movies. On his TV series, Baretta, he played a tough-talking, soft-hearted detective with a cockatoo named Fred and a wardrobe full of disguises. In the oddly prophetic first episode, Baretta's lover was killed. During the show's run, Blake was notorious for feuding with the directors, or simply ignoring them. After Baretta, Blake continued working on television, frequently playing Baretta-like tough guys. For the series Hell Town, he played Baretta with a priest's collar instead of a cockatoo, and after Hell Town was cancelled he vanished from Hollywood, saying he wanted to get his life back together. He did not return to the cameras for seven years. In 1995 he appeared in Money Train with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, and in 1997 he played the mystery man in David Lynch's Lost Highway with Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette.

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