Kevin Dobson
Actor who found TV fame as Telly Savalas’s partner in Kojak
KEVIN DOBSON, the actor, who has died aged 77, was best known as Telly Savalas’s lugubrious sidekick Detective Bobby Crocker in the popular 1970s detective series
Kojak.
The CBS show, which was set and partly filmed on location in the gritty streets of Manhattan, was built around the shiny-domed GreekAmerican Lieutenant Theo Kojak, with his tinted glasses, lollipop and catchphrase: “Who loves ya, baby?” It ran on BBC One from 1974 to 1978.
Dobson – whose boss addressed him as “pussycat” or “Crocker!” – liked to tell how the show’s pecking order was established by an incident early in the run.
The pair had dashed from their police Buick to chase some baddies through a warehouse. Dobson, younger and fitter than the portly Savalas, reached the door first, when he felt a hand on his shoulder: “I always go first,” said Savalas. “You’re always one step behind and one step to the right, kid.”
“I never forgot,” Dobson recalled, “and that’s what I did for five years.” Crocker was in all but two episodes, and the on-screen chemistry he shared with Savalas contributed considerably to the show’s success.
In the 1980s he resurfaced playing the dashing federal prosecutor “Mack” Mackenzie in Knots Landing, the Dallas spin-off set in and around a prosperous Los Angeles cul-de-sac.
Kevin Patrick Dobson was born into an Irish-american family in the Queens district of New York on March 18 1943. His father was James Dobson, janitor at the local Catholic school; his mother Rita looked after Kevin and his six siblings. After Monsignor Mcclancy Memorial and then Newtown high schools he did two years in the Army as a military policeman.
He kept going with a variety of jobs before taking up acting full-time, including working as a trainman, brakeman and conductor on the Long Island Railroad; when he started attending auditions regularly he supported himself by driving a cab at night.
In 1973, after critics and viewers warmly received The Marcus-nelson Murders, a TV movie introducing Savalas as Kojak, CBS commissioned a series based around the character. The lean, curlyhaired Dobson – who had by now appeared in a string of crime dramas, among them The Mod Squad, Cannon and Ironside – was cast in the role of the rookie detective Crocker. He borrowed a friend’s suit for the audition.
A supporter of US Army veterans’ organisations, Dobson credited his military service for the ease with which he took to his role in Kojak: “I knew how to hold a gun and throw somebody against a wall. I got a call [the next night] asking if I’d sign a contract.”
The lollipops which became so much a trademark of the Kojak character started life in the fifth episode, Dobson recalled, as an alternative to the cigarillos puffed by the no-nonsense detective. “A friend of mine on the set had a lollipop in his shirt pocket, so I flipped it to him … That started the lollipop.”
Kojak was cancelled in 1978, and Dobson’s most high-profile role after that was Mack Mackenzie, who joined the soap opera Knots Landing in its fourth season (1982), marrying the central character Karen (Michele Lee). He stayed for the show’s remaining 10 seasons, and came back in 1997 for a mini-series, Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-sac.
Dobson reprised the role of Crocker in 1990 for Kojak: It’s Always Something, a reunion made-for-tv film in which his character had graduated to assistant District Attorney, handling the prosecution of one of Kojak’s cop buddies.
Another notable television part was the hard-boiled New York private eye Mike Hammer in Margin for Murder (1981); in the cinema he featured as a junior naval officer in the 1976 all-star war film Midway.
Kevin Dobson is survived by his wife, Susan Greene, two sons and a daughter.