Robert Stack
Robert Stack is an actor, born 1919.
The voice did half the work. Robert Stack spoke in a clipped granite baritone that made every line sound like an official statement, and he built a career of more than forty features on the assumption that an audience believes a man who sounds like that.
He was in pictures from 1940, in The Mortal Storm and then To Be or Not to Be, and his best film work came in the melodramas of the 1950s: Kyle Hadley in Written on the Wind, which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, and Roger Shumann in The Tarnished Angels. He worked through The High and the Mighty and House of Bamboo in the same stretch. Television made him famous. As Eliot Ness in The Untouchables he won an Emmy in 1960, and the role fixed his public image for two decades.
Then, remarkably, he became funny. Airplane! cast him as Captain Rex Kramer and got its biggest laughs by having him play it precisely as straight as he had played Ness. That discovery kept him busy for twenty years: 1941, Caddyshack II, BASEketball as himself, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Joe Versus the Volcano and Ultra Magnus in The Transformers: The Movie. Alongside it he hosted and narrated Unsolved Mysteries into the 2000s, lending the same authority to real cases. He died in 2003.
Movies (23)
- Airplane! (1980)
- The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
- 1941 (1979)
- Recess: School's Out (2001)
- Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
- BASEketball (1998)
- Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
- Uncommon Valor (1983)
- Is Paris Burning? (1966)
- To Be or Not to Be (1942)
- The High and the Mighty (1954)
- Written on the Wind (1956)
- Mumford (1999)
- Great Day in the Morning (1956)
- The Tarnished Angels (1957)
- The Last Voyage (1960)
- Caddyshack II (1988)
- Hercules: Zero to Hero (1999)
- The Mortal Storm (1940)
- Plain Clothes (1988)
- Killer Bud (2001)
- House of Bamboo (1955)
- Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood (2019)
TV (9)
Where to start with Robert Stack
Airplane! first, and if you have somehow avoided it, read nothing about it beforehand. Stack plays a pilot exactly as he would have played one in a straight-faced 1950s aviation picture, and that single decision is the engine of the comedy.
Then work backwards to The Untouchables to see where the persona was forged, and to Written on the Wind for the finest dramatic performance on this page, an heir coming apart, played without any appeal for sympathy. To Be or Not to Be holds the early charm. Unsolved Mysteries is the one that unsettled a generation of children, and it works because he reads a case file the way he once read cockpit dialogue. For the comedy encore, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and The Transformers: The Movie are pure voice, and both are better than they had to be.