Bartlett Robinson

Bartlett Whitney Robinson was an American actor born in Manhattan, New York, on December 9, 1912, who worked across radio, stage, film, and television over five decades. He died on March 26, 1986, of cancer at his home in Fallbrook, California, at age 73. He was also credited professionally as Bart Robinson.

Robinson's career began in 1933 when he and a group of friends formed a performance collective called the Sunday Players, who subsequently traveled together to Los Angeles in search of steady work. He secured a position at radio station KFI in Los Angeles and spent the remainder of the 1930s and into the 1940s moving between New York and Los Angeles to pursue both stage and radio opportunities. A significant radio milestone came in 1943, when Robinson became the first actor to voice the title character in the radio adaptation of Perry Mason, a role that several performers would go on to fill after him.

His Broadway career spanned from 1932 to 1954 and included appearances alongside notable performers such as Henry Fonda and Lillian Gish. Among his stage credits were Naughty Naught '00 and Sweet River, both in 1936, followed by Dear Ruth in 1944. His later Broadway work included Room Service, Point of No Return, Light Up the Sky, Another Part of the Forest, The Girl in Pink Tights in 1953, and The Prescott Proposals, also in 1953.

As television expanded rapidly in the late 1940s and 1950s, Robinson shifted his focus increasingly toward that medium and toward film. On June 13, 1949, he appeared in a television production of Light Up the Sky on the anthology series Ford Theatre, and he made an earlier television appearance in Ski Story on Armstrong Circle Theatre, which aired January 13, 1953. His feature film debut came in the 1956 comedy The Birds and the Bees, starring George Gobel, Mitzi Gaynor, and David Niven, in which he played a guest. He went on to appear in 21 films between 1956 and 1973, with his final film role being that of Dr. Orva in Woody Allen's 1973 comedy Sleeper.

On television, Robinson accumulated more than 110 credits between 1949 and 1982, frequently cast as authority figures including military officers, judges, doctors, wealthy ranchers, and corporate executives. He made seven guest appearances on Gunsmoke between 1956 and 1960, eight appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents between 1958 and 1962, six appearances on Perry Mason between 1959 and 1966, and three appearances on The Twilight Zone between 1961 and 1962. He held the recurring role of Frank Caldwell across all 26 episodes of the series Mona McCluskey from 1965 to 1966. His final television appearance came on April 12, 1982, in the Lou Grant episode titled Law, in which he played Jacob Bauman, a character he had first portrayed on the same series in a 1979 episode called Witness.

In his personal life, Robinson married Margaret Whitney Ballantine in 1938. The marriage produced two children and lasted 33 years before ending in divorce in 1971. The couple later remarried, and that union continued until Robinson's death in 1986.