Jason Robards was born in Chicago on July 26, 1922, into a family already moving toward the kind of American sorrow he would spend a lifetime dramatizing. His father was one of the biggest names in Hollywood, a fact that shaped everything that followed. But before the stage, there was the sea, and before the sea, there was a youth that did not look much like acting at all. Universities came calling with athletic interest, but at 17, he joined the Navy.
The war Robards actually fought was harrowing enough that it never needed the embellishments it later acquired. It was what happened after Pearl Harbor that put him in the thick of the action. And it was there, while both the ocean and the Japanese were actively trying to kill him, that he decided he wanted to act. He played men who were self-deluding with unbearable tenderness, perhaps because he understood the mechanism from the inside.
The eventual break was tangled up with two men his own age who would become his life’s great collaborators, both as broke and as stubborn as he was. One of them left for a better-paying film, and before Robards could say no, the other launched into a monologue from *The Iceman Cometh*. When that play opened on May 6, 1956, Robards had found his favorite role for the rest of his life, for the most elemental reason an actor can have. It was the only time the two men ever acted together, and it was a gift in the most literal sense.
It won him the only competitive Tony he would ever win out of eight nominations, more than any other male actor in the awards’ history. Eugene O’Neill had died in 1953, leaving his most autobiographical play, *Long Day’s Journey into Night*, sealed in a publisher’s vault with instructions not to stage it for 25 years. But it was staged anyway, winning O’Neill a posthumous Pulitzer and placing Robards at the center of two of the greatest theatrical events of the decade. The character he played, a charming wreck drinking himself to death under the shadow of an actor father, sat so close to Robards’s own life that the resemblance was almost unbearable.
Asked whether he and the playwright had acted alike, Robards refused the comparison with fierce loyalty. His professional ascent ran on a private life that was, to put it mildly, eventful. His first wife was Eleanor Pitman, whom he married in 1948 and with whom he had three children before the marriage ended in 1958. Decades later, when asked to lend his voice to a public radio documentary about illness, he volunteered because of her.
Then came Betty Joan Perske, known to the world as Lauren Bacall, and the marriage that would define his celebrity. Of all the children in their blended household, she said that Robards’s son Sam was the only one not screwed up due to childhood traumas, a sentence only Bacall could land as both compliment and indictment. Through it all, Robards remained a creature of the theater who regarded movies as a cash machine to be raided and then fled. But the cash was good, and the roles kept coming.
In 1970, he played Lieutenant General Walter Short in *Tora! Tora! Tora! *, a lavish reconstruction of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And then, in 1972, on a serpentine road in the hills above Los Angeles, the bottle very nearly finished the job it had been working on for a long time. He should have died. His face was destroyed, and surgeons had to rebuild it feature by feature, leaving the most watched face in American theater subtly and permanently altered. It was two more years before he gave up drinking for good in 1974, crediting Alcoholics Anonymous with saving the life the mountain had spared.
He lent his gravelly voice and rebuilt face to public campaigns, urging other drunks to do what he had taken so long to do himself. He carried no shame about it, saying it was all out in the open and that he had never hidden anything about his marriages or drinking. The sober stretch brought his most decorated screen work. He played Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the *Washington Post*, in *All the President’s Men*, then won a second consecutive Oscar for playing the hard-boiled novelist Dashiell Hammett in *Julia*, becoming the first actor ever to take back-to-back supporting actor awards.
He was nominated a third time in 1980 for his uncanny turn as the reclusive Howard Hughes. He returned to the stage repeatedly, and to O’Neill the way other men return to a hometown or a grievance, taking *The Iceman Cometh* back to Broadway nearly three decades after he first played it. He remained a man who embodied flinty, weathered authority, with a face that looked as if it had survived something because it had. No actor ever owned a playwright so completely while living a version of those same plays.
He was suspicious of his own legend most of all, but he never stopped being its most persuasive proof.