Dewey Robinson

Dewey Robinson was an American actor born in New Haven, Connecticut, on August 17, 1898, who built a career spanning both Broadway and film before his death on December 11, 1950, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Robinson's stage career began in 1922 with his Broadway debut in The Last Warning, a melodrama that ran for 238 performances over seven months. His Broadway work concluded in 1925 with Solid Ivory, a comedy that marked his final appearance on the stage.

Standing 6 feet 1 inch tall with a barrel-chested build, Robinson transitioned to film in 1931, when he appeared as a waiter in George Cukor's Tarnished Lady, starring Tallulah Bankhead, though that performance went uncredited. Over the following two decades he appeared in more than 250 films. His physical size and capacity to project menace made him a frequent presence in the gangster pictures that dominated certain periods of Hollywood production. Among the films for which he received billing in the main cast were Murder on the Campus (1934), Navy Secrets (1939), and There Goes Kelly (1945).

His early film roles included a polo-playing hood in Little Giant (1933), opposite Edward G. Robinson, a slave supervisor in Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933), and an appearance in the Ben Turpin short Keystone Hotel (1935). During the 1940s, Robinson became a recurring member of writer-director Preston Sturges's informal company of character actors, appearing in eight of Sturges's films. Late in his career, he played a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), portraying a character who moves from bigotry to enthusiastic support of Jackie Robinson.

Robinson died of a heart attack on December 11, 1950, and was cremated. Because of the volume of work he had accumulated, films featuring him continued to appear after his death, with At Sword's Point, a Musketeer adventure, released in 1952.