Robert Judd

Robert Judd (c. 1926 – January 20, 1986) was an American actor whose work spanned stage, television, and film. Before entering the profession, he served in the United States Navy, leaving the service in 1946. He held various jobs, including work as a clothes presser, before discovering acting in the late 1960s.

Judd's film career began with Across 110th Street in 1972. In 1977 he co-starred with William Sanderson in the exploitation action film Fight for Your Life. Sanderson later recalled their working relationship in a 2017 interview, describing a strong personal rapport and noting that Judd handled difficult material with particular grace. His television work included appearances on Saturday Night Live, the soap operas As the World Turns and The Guiding Light, and the 1980 PBS series Gettin' to Know Me, which centered on an African-American family.

His stage career encompassed regional theater, Off-Broadway productions, and work with companies including the Actor's Theatre of Louisville, where he played Crooks in Of Mice and Men, the Cincinnati Playhouse, and the Crossroads Theatre of New Jersey. He appeared in the revival of Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, first at the Long Wharf Theatre in 1979 and subsequently on Broadway in 1980, marking his Broadway debut.

Judd's most prominent Broadway credit came through August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play received its first staged reading in 1982 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, with a cast that included Charles S. Dutton, Joe Seneca, and Leonard Jackson. During early rehearsals, Jackson and Judd exchanged roles; Judd had originally been assigned the part of Slow Drag the bassist but moved to the role of Toledo the piano player without objection. He later said of the play, "I told them that with this play, I didn't mind what role I played. From the minute I read it, I knew that it would make history." After Wilson and director Lloyd Richards developed the production over nearly two years, Ma Rainey opened at the Yale Repertory Theater in April 1984 before transferring to Broadway, where it ran from October 11, 1984, through June 9, 1985. New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote of Judd, Seneca, and Jackson that their monologues carried "the beauty and poignance of the old-time solos that the musicians improvise on their instruments."

Judd and Seneca were subsequently reunited in Walter Hill's film Crossroads, in which Judd portrayed the Devil, a character also referred to as Scratch or Legba. Dressed in a black suit, broad-brimmed black hat, crisp white shirt, and black bowtie, Judd delivered a performance that drew notice for its controlled menace. The film was released in March 1986, by which point Judd had already died at the age of 59 from stomach cancer. He had kept his illness private throughout production; his Ma Rainey castmates had attributed his coughing and nausea to stage anxiety.

Beyond his performing career, Judd volunteered as a counselor for Teens with Drug Problems and worked with Elmcor, a nonprofit social services organization in Queens. He was also a photographer. August Wilson contributed a piece titled "Memory of Actor Robert Judd" to the 1992 book Broadway Day & Night, describing Judd as a black man in America making his own rules and noting that he had continued to write roles with Judd in mind. When Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was revived on Broadway in 2003, the production was dedicated to the memories of Theresa Merritt, Joe Seneca, and Robert Judd.