Edward G. Robinson

Edward G. Robinson was an American actor born Emanuel Goldenberg on December 12, 1893, in Bucharest, Romania, into a Yiddish-speaking Romanian Jewish family. He was the fifth of six sons born to Sarah and Yeshaya Moyshe Goldenberg, a builder and tinsmith. The family emigrated to the United States following an antisemitic attack on one of his brothers, and Robinson arrived in New York City on February 21, 1904, settling on the Lower East Side. He attended Townsend Harris High School and the City College of New York, where he initially planned to pursue a career in criminal law. A scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts redirected him toward the stage, and it was at this point that he adopted the name Edward G. Robinson, with the G. representing his original surname Goldenberg. He chose the given name Edward after King Edward VII and took the surname Robinson after hearing it in a play.

Robinson made his professional stage debut in April 1913 in Binghamton, New York, playing a character named Sato in Paid in Full. He subsequently joined the Orpheum Players, a Cincinnati stock company, for twenty-two weeks, performing in numerous productions including two separate roles in Alias Jimmy Valentine. A touring production of Kismet brought him to Ottawa and Montreal before closing in November 1914. His Broadway debut followed in 1915 at the Hudson Theatre in Under Fire, an Archibald and Edgar Selwyn production written by Roi Cooper Megrue, in which he played four roles: a French spy, a Belgian peasant, a Prussian soldier, and a Cockney private. The Selwyns subsequently cast him in another Megrue play, Under Sentence. Over the following years he took on a broad range of characters across multiple productions, including a Filipino in The Pawn (1917), a German soldier in Drafted (1917), a Swede in The Deluge (1917), and a French-Canadian in The Little Teacher (1918). He left The Little Teacher to enlist in the United States Navy, serving during World War I at Pelham Bay Naval Training Station, though he was not sent overseas.

Returning to Broadway after the war, Robinson appeared in First is Last in 1919, followed by productions of Night Lodging and Poldekin in 1920, and Samson and Delilah in November of that year. He performed in five plays at the Elitch Theatre in Denver during the summer of 1921 and appeared in the 1922 revival of The Deluge. In 1923 alone he appeared in four Broadway productions: Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, Ferenc Molnár's Launzi, and A Royal Fandango, starring Ethel Barrymore. Among his other Broadway credits were the plays Kibitzer, A Man with Red Hair, and Juarez and Maximilian. Over a sixty-year career, Robinson appeared in approximately thirty Broadway productions.

His stage work ran parallel to a film career that made him one of Hollywood's most recognizable figures. He rose to stardom with his portrayal of the title character in Little Caesar in 1931 and became closely associated with gangster roles. His film work extended well beyond that type, however, encompassing the biopics Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and A Dispatch from Reuters, both released in 1940, and the film noirs Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window, both from 1944. He won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor for House of Strangers in 1949. His postwar credits also included The Stranger (1946) and Key Largo (1948).

During the 1930s and 1940s, Robinson was a public critic of fascism and Nazism and contributed more than $250,000 to over 850 organizations involved in war relief, as well as to cultural, educational, and religious groups. In the 1950s he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare. He was cleared of deliberate Communist involvement but renounced a number of leftist organizations to avoid further investigation. The scrutiny placed him on Hollywood's graylist, limiting him to work at minor studios. His return to major studio productions came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as Dathan in The Ten Commandments in 1956.

That same year, Robinson starred on Broadway in Middle of the Night, a performance that earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play in 1956. He played his final screen role as a character in the science-fiction film Soylent Green, released in 1973. Robinson died on January 26, 1973. Two months after his death, he was awarded an Academy Honorary Award for his contributions to the film industry. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him twenty-fourth on its list of the twenty-five greatest male stars of Classic American cinema. Over the course of his career he appeared in more than one hundred films.