Robert Pastene

Robert Pastene (January 29, 1918 – October 15, 1991) was an American actor born in Brockton, Massachusetts, whose career spanned Broadway, television, and regional theater across several decades. His stage work brought him into contact with plays by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Brecht, Aeschylus, Shaw, and Lillian Hellman, and his Broadway appearances extended from 1942 to 1968.

Pastene's first Broadway appearance came in 1945 in the comedy The First Crocus, a cast that included Jocelyn Brando. He returned to Broadway in 1947 for two productions: a staging of Hamlet starring Maurice Evans in the title role, and Crime and Punishment, which featured John Gielgud, Lillian Gish, Sanford Meisner, Alexander Scourby, and Marian Seldes. His Broadway credits also include Choephori, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Taming of the Shrew, and A House in the Country. In 1952 he appeared in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour on Broadway, playing Dr. Joseph Cardin in a production that Hellman herself directed. Cast member Patricia Neal noted that Hellman could be a severe director, and both Neal and Christopher Plummer recounted that Pastene bore the force of Hellman's intensity during rehearsals. His off-Broadway work included the 1949 Lenox Hill Playhouse production of Shaw's Saint Joan, with Kim Stanley in the title role, and he subsequently performed in the Broadway staging of the same play with Uta Hagen as Joan, reprising the same role.

In 1963, Pastene joined the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for its inaugural season, a professional relationship that would define a significant portion of his career through the 1960s and 1970s. The theater's first production was Shakespeare's Hamlet, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, with George Grizzard in the title role and Jessica Tandy as Gertrude; Pastene played Polonius. He went on to appear in numerous productions at the Guthrie in both dramatic and comic works, classical and modern. Among these was a production of Pirandello's Enrico IV, in which he played the title role Henry alongside Michael Moriarty and Gale Sondergaard. Actress Zoe Caldwell, who performed with Pastene at the Guthrie in productions including Chekhov's Three Sisters and Hamlet, wrote about him in her memoir I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress's Journey, describing him as one of the finest actors she had encountered. In 1973, Pastene appeared at the McCarter Theatre in a production of John Osborne's The Entertainer, receiving strongly positive reviews.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Pastene was also active in television, working extensively during the period known as the Golden Age of Television. His theater program biography for The Children's Hour noted that television had provided him steady work, during which he played roles ranging from Abraham Lincoln on Studio One to the title character in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The Studio One production of Abraham Lincoln also featured a twenty-one-year-old James Dean in its cast.

On May 11, 1953, near the close of the Broadway run of The Children's Hour, Pastene married singer and actress Susan Johnson in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the time of their marriage, Johnson was performing at Le Ruban Blue, a nightclub on the upper east side of Manhattan. The two later divorced. Pastene died on October 15, 1991.