Robert Stack
Published: 12:01AM BST 16 May 2003
Robert Stack, the American actor who died on Wednesday aged 84, is best remembered for his portrayal of the steely-eyed, square-jawed Eliot Ness in the 1950s' television series The Untouchables.
Stack was completely credible as the Treasury agent who succeeded in jailing Al Capone. Indeed, so convincing was his performance that it won the approval of Ness's widow, who endorsed the series and claimed that Stack captured her husband's "total commitment and anger".
The Untouchables rapidly found a cult following, both in America and in Britain, where fedoras and pinstripe suits became de rigueur among fans of the series. In 1963 the programme was taken off as a result of vociferous lobbying by the Italian American Organisation. The organisation objected to the "continued portrayal of Italian-Americans as hoodlums and members of the Mafia". Their objections were taken up by the American Anti-Violence League, which condemned the series as portraying violence too graphically. The series was axed, but Robert Stack remained typecast as a hard-edged policeman for the rest of his career.
Off screen, Robert Stack bore no resemblance to the policemen he played. The son of wealthy Los Angeles socialites, he spent most of his early life travelling through Europe, speedboat racing and playing polo.
He had little in common with Eliot Ness apart from a passion for heavy-duty firearms. While Ness was a devotee of the machine gun, Stack preferred a rifle, and was for several years the national sharp-shooting champion of the United States.
Robert Langford Stack was born in Los Angeles on January 13 1919, the son of James Langford Stack and his wife Elizabeth, an aspiring opera singer. Stack's great-grandfather arrived in what was then the village of Los Angeles in 1849, and set up the community's first theatre. Both his grandparents had been Italian opera singers.
Because Robert's mother wanted to study opera, Robert grew up in Paris and Rome, learning to speak both French and Italian fluently; he was still unable to speak English when, aged seven, he returned to America. As a teenager he showed considerable talent as a sportsman: he and his brother won the International Outboard Motor Championships in Venice, and remained speedboat racing champions in America for three years. At 16 Robert became a member of the All American Skeet Rifle Team; he set two world records and became National Skeet Champion.
In 1937 he briefly attended the University of Southern California (distinguishing himself on the polo team) before abandoning his formal education to study acting and singing.
Stack attended the Henry Duffy School of Theatre in California for six months, until he was offered his first film role. "My singing classes had been going badly," he recalled, "and my tutor told me to go down to Universal and listen to Deanna Durbin. I did, and while I was standing off to one side of the set, Joe Pasternak came over and offered me a role in the film."
This was First Love (1939), a romantic musical starring Deanna Durbin. There was frenzied press interest at the time because in the film Durbin, then aged 17, received her first screen kiss; and, as Stack was the one who kissed her, he gained considerable free publicity, and his acting future was secured. Later in 1939 he joined the Navy, serving as a gunnery instructor throughout the Second World War.
While in the armed forces he continued to make films, among them Mortal Storm (1940), Badlands of Dakota (1941) and Eagle Squadron (1942). After the war, Stack remained at MGM - he had signed a contract in 1940 - and made Fighter Squadron (1948), and Date with Judy (1948), which starred Wallace Beery and Elizabeth Taylor.
Throughout the 1950s Stack appeared in numerous "B" films, including The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951); Bwana Devil (1952); War Paint (1953); and Conquest of Cochise (1953). He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as the alcoholic playboy in Written on the Wind (1956) opposite Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson. In the event, he did not win the Oscar, but was offered a role in the superior adventure film The Last Voyage (1956), in which he played a passenger on a sinking cruise liner.
In 1959 Desi Arnaz approached Stack with the idea of making a television series about Eliot Ness. Stack was originally against the idea, considering himself exclusively a film star. However, having seen some of the scripts for The Untouchables he accepted the role of Ness. "I knew it would be a success," he later recalled. "The scripts were grim and based on real events, the gangsters were tough and Ness was an ordinary man in a cheap suit who was impassioned by his need to stamp out crime."
Stack's prediction proved accurate. Desilu Productions distinguished itself from its contemporaries by spending money on scripts as well as on stars. A conscious attempt was made not to glamorise the gangsters, and Stack, as the central grey presence of Ness, proved totally credible. "I felt I had to play him dull, almost a nonentity," he remembered. "Because the thugs were so colourful, so flashy, we needed a balance."
Within weeks the series had become a cult, and expressions such as "Call Eliot Ness!" and "Hey Nitti!" had entered American slang. (Nitti was the best dressed of Ness's adversaries, and the term was used to describe anyone who dressed well.) British enthusiasm for the show was such that it was not unusual for gangs of teenagers to adopt fedoras and pinstripe suits in emulation of the gangsters they favoured. The show ran for five years and won continuous praise for its realism. Less well known was the fact that all of the programmes were monitored by the FBI, and special agents made summaries of the scripts.
J Edgar Hoover, infuriated that Ness was occasionally portrayed as solving crimes which came under the FBI's jurisdiction, insisted that his operatives kept a record of the programme. Hoover also initiated an investigation of the show's scriptwriters to discover whether any of them were ex-FBI agents. In documents which were made public after Desi Arnaz's death, FBI agents were described as "pressuring" Arnaz to change the scripts to show the FBI solving the crimes. If children wrote to Hoover for details of Ness's exploits, they received a curt reply stating that: "Eliot Ness was never a special agent in the FBI, he was employed as a Prohibition Officer in the Internal Revenue Service."
When The Untouchables ended, Robert Stack returned to his film career. By this stage, however, the public so identified him with Eliot Ness that they found him unacceptable in non-police roles. He made two less than successful films - The Caretakers (1963) and The Corrupt Ones (1967) - before returning to television in The Name of the Game. In this, Stack played an embittered investigative journalist, and the role was close enough to that of a policeman for the public to accept him.
Stack continued in the series for four years. He then made two more attempts at returning to the cinema, with roles in the French film Day of the Delinquent (1970) and in the ill-fated melodrama, Story of a Woman (1971).
Neither film proved popular, and Stack accepted the role of Captain Evers in the police series Most Wanted. The part of the police captain was originally written for a woman, but the director changed the sex of the character to make a role for Stack.
Unsurprisingly, the show was not a success, and it was axed after only 20 episodes. But Stack remained unmoved by such setbacks. "I was sorry the show flopped," he remarked. "I always like to do 60 episodes if I can. That means I then own 25 per cent of the show and have an annuity for life." He took two years off before appearing in Steven Spielberg's wartime farce 1941; the film was a box office flop, but gave Stack his first chance at playing a comedy role.
He next appeared in the spoof disaster film Airplane! and, although he was excellent as the humourless air traffic controller in the film, he was offered no more comedy roles. Stack therefore returned to playing policemen in the television series Strike Force (1981).
Although Strike Force was, if anything, more violent than The Untouchables, it did not seem to have the same authenticity, and ran for only one year. During the remainder of the 1980s, Stack accepted less and less work. He made two films - Uncommon Valour (1983), and the forgettable comedy Big Trouble (1984), in which he starred with his wife Rosemarie. He appeared in the television mini-series Hollywood Wives in 1985, and made his theatrical debut in a limited season of La Cage aux Folles on Broadway.
In 1989 Stack was approached about the possibility of recreating the role of Eliot Ness for television, but was doubtful about a second series. He had not enjoyed Kevin Costner's portrayal of Ness in the 1987 film version, claiming that "too much was factually wrong. Ness was no wimp; he was a tough street kid".
Stack was persuaded to make the pilot for a series provisionally entitled The Return of the Untouchables, which was set in the 1940s. "Obviously we couldn't do it in modern times because Ness would have been too old," Stack recalled, "so we set it in the Forties, with Ness coming out of retirement to fight crime for the second time." Later the same year Stack appeared as the host on the television series Unsolved Mysteries.
When not working Robert Stack lived with his wife in Los Angeles. He kept up his keen interest in competitive sports, and liked to play tennis and golf daily.
He is survived by his wife Rosemarie, whom he married in 1956, and by their son and daughter.
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