Stack, Robert

(b. 13 January 1919 in Los Angeles, California; d. 14 May 2003 in Los Angeles, California), film and television actor who played Eliot Ness on television’s The Untouchables (1959–1963) and was the host of the reality-based television series Unsolved Mysteries (1987–2002).

Stack’s mother, Elizabeth Modini (Wood) Stack, insisted that he be named Charles Langford Modini Stack after her father, but her husband, James Langford Stack, soon changed the name to Robert. Stack’s parents were prominent members of Los Angeles society. In 1928 the Los Angeles Times referred to James Stack as a millionaire sportsman and advertising executive. Elizabeth Stack’s presence at society functions was noted in the local newspapers. The Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons described Elizabeth as “one of our social leaders.”

Stack had a direct family connection to the arts. His great-great-grandfather owned and operated the Orpheum, one of the first theaters in Los Angeles. Several relatives were opera singers, notably his uncle by marriage, Richard Bonelli, a Metropolitan Opera baritone, and his maternal grandparents, Charles Modini Wood and Mamie Barker Perry.

When Stack was a year old his parents divorced. His older brother remained in California with his father, and Stack moved to Europe with his mother. The youngster initially spoke only French and Italian; he learned English when he and his mother returned to Los Angeles in 1925. His parents remarried three years later.

In his youth Stack excelled at trapshooting and skeet shooting. An excellent marksman, he placed second in 1934 in the junior competition at the Pacific International Trapshooting Association Tournament, breaking eighty-three of one hundred targets. He earned a second-place finish in 1935 in the skeet shooting National Championship. The following year he won the national twenty-gauge championship with ninety-eight out of one hundred hits. In 1937 Stack recorded more than 350 consecutive hits as a skeet marksman. The National Skeet Shooting Association named him a first-team All-American.

In the late 1930s Stack was enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he starred on the school’s polo team. His budding relationships with Hollywood luminaries, however, sparked his interest in the dramatic arts, and he left college to become an actor. Stack had befriended Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who hired him to teach them skeet shooting, and he counted the actors Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, and Fred MacMurray and the producers Darryl Zanuck and Walter Wanger as mentors. Stack studied drama at a school operated by the actor and producer Henry Duffy and began appearing in local theatrical productions. In 1938, as a member of the El Capitan Players, Stack had roles in Pride and Prejudice and in Katharine Dayton and George S. Kaufman’s First Lady at the Las Palmas Theater. For the latter, Stack earned an encouraging press notice. “Robert Stack exhibited a delightful sense of characterization and an impeccable French accent as the Marquis de Gannay,” wrote Katherine T. Von Blon in the Los Angeles Times. Of his performance the following year in the Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements comedy June Mad, Von Blon noted, “Young Robert Stack took first honors with his ingratiating portrayal of the young collegiate lothario. This young actor is handsome and assured.”

Stack’s square-jawed good looks, pleasant speaking voice, and movie industry contacts combined to win him a contract with Universal Pictures in 1939. He was signed after the producer Joe Pasternak screen-tested him in a love scene with the B-movie actress Helen Parrish. Stack’s most notable early screen appearance came in his debut, First Love (1939), in which he gave the studio’s top moneymaker, the juvenile singing star Deanna Durbin, her highly publicized first film kiss. At the end of the year the newspaper and radio columnist Jimmy Fidler cited Stack and Maureen O’Hara as the “outstanding dramatic discoveries of 1939.”

Stack followed his debut with supporting roles in two classics. In The Mortal Storm (1940), directed by Frank Borzage, Stack was cast as a zealous young Nazi Party member. In To Be or Not to Be (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Stack played a Polish aviator who romances a popular stage actress (played by Stack’s friend Carole Lombard) as the Nazis sweep through Europe. He had also reteamed with Durbin in Nice Girl? in 1941. Stack’s career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as an aerial gunnery instructor in the U.S. Navy. He was absent from the screen from 1942 to 1948.

Stack was not a major star before entering the military and had difficulty reestablishing his career when he returned to Hollywood. His first postwar screen credits were undistinguished: A Date with Judy, Miss Tatlock’s Millions, and Fighter Squadron (all 1948); Mr. Music (1950); and My Outlaw Brother (1951). Stack was maturing into a robustly handsome leading man, however, and his lot improved in the director Budd Boetticher’s Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). In that film Stack played his first substantial role, an American who takes up bullfighting in Mexico. Stack appeared in Bwana Devil (1952), an adventure yarn that was noteworthy as the first three-dimensional feature. He began guest-starring on dramatic anthology television series such as Lux Video Theatre (1950–1959), The Ford Television Theatre (1952–1957), Producers’ Showcase (1954–1957), and Playhouse 90 (1956–1961).

Throughout the years the gossip columns reported accounts of “eligible bachelor” Stack squiring attractive women around Hollywood. In 1954 he began dating yet another, Rosemarie Bowe, whom he married on 23 January 1956. A daughter was born in 1957 and a son the following year.

In the mid-1950s Stack gave three of his best screen performances in William A. Wellman’s The High and the Mighty (1954), playing an airline pilot whose craft develops engine trouble; Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956), cast as a self-destructive alcoholic millionaire; and Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (1957), playing a barnstorming flyer. For his performance in Written on the Wind, Stack earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

By the late 1950s Stack’s chief dramatic film roles were behind him, but his career was about to flourish. Starting in 1959 he earned his greatest fame playing the stoic, stalwart crime fighter Eliot Ness on the hit television series The Untouchables (1959–1963). The show was set in Chicago during Prohibition and charted the exploits of the real-life U.S. Treasury Department agent Ness as he labored to destroy the city’s criminal empires. Stack’s portrayal of Ness as a dour G-man with a steely glare—a simple, heroic enforcer of the law who was determined to obliterate organized crime—won him an Emmy Award after the show’s first season. A disadvantage was that Stack’s depiction of Ness would typecast him and establish his television persona for decades to come.

After The Untouchables, Stack played a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent turned magazine editor intent on exposing corruption on the television crime series The Name of the Game (1968–1971). He played a Los Angeles Police Department captain on another crime show, Most Wanted (1976–1977). Stack appeared in made-for-television movies such as The Strange and Deadly Occurrence (1974), The Honorable Sam Houston (1975), Adventures of the Queen (1975), and Murder on Flight 502 (1975).

In the late 1970s Stack resumed his movie career. He worked on films shot in Italy and France and occasionally appeared in American features. Most notably, he played comic roles in 1941 (1979) and Airplane! (1980), in which he deftly lampooned the stiff, humorless characters he often played in movies and on television. In 1941, the director Steven Spielberg’s all-star-cast farce, Stack played a general who is brought to tears while watching Walt Disney’s Dumbo (1941). In Airplane!, a classic satire of airplane disaster films, Stack joined the other aging dramatic actors Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, and Leslie Nielsen in parodying their on-screen personas. Stack’s character, the veteran pilot Rex Kramer, was a direct link to his role in The High and the Mighty.

Stack’s final years primarily were spent working on television. He starred in one last dramatic series, Strike Force (1981–1982), playing yet another Los Angeles Police Department captain. Given his cool, no-nonsense public persona, Stack was the ideal host of Unsolved Mysteries (1987–2002), the long-running reality-based series that spotlighted unsolved crime stories, unexplained scientific phenomena, and reunions between long-separated persons. Stack’s deep, foreboding baritone combined with his deadpan expression to emphasize the gravity of the proceedings. He played Eliot Ness one more time in the made-for-television movie The Return of Eliot Ness (1991).

In 2002 Stack was diagnosed with prostate cancer. In October of that year he underwent radiation treatment. On 14 May 2003 Stack died of heart failure at his Los Angeles home. He is buried in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

In an industry in which stardom often is measured in months rather than years, Stack enjoyed a six-decade-long career as a film and television personality. While never a great actor or top Hollywood star, he was a welcome presence on the large and small screens. He may have been typecast in Eliot Ness–like roles after The Untouchables, but he did not allow this pigeonholing to dampen his spirit or destroy his career. He even had the good humor to parody these types of characterizations in 1941 and Airplane!.

The autobiography that Stack wrote with Mark Evans, Straight Shooting (1980), is the best source for material on the actor. His involvement with The Untouchables is cited in Tise Vahimagi, The Untouchables (1998); and Kenneth Tucker, Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions (2000). Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post (all 16 May 2003).

Rob Edelman