Robert Blake
Actor who starred as a real-life killer in In Cold Blood and was later accused of murdering his wife
ROBERT BLAKE, who has died aged 89, was an actor who was best known for the film In Cold Blood and the police series Baretta, but his career ended when he stood trial for the murder of his wife; he was acquitted in a criminal court but was later ordered to pay millions of dollars to her children.
In 2001 he had had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles with his second wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, and by his account he had left her in their car while he went back inside to retrieve a gun he had left behind. When he returned, he claimed, she had been shot in the head.
In 2005 the case went to trial – he had spent a year in prison on remand after initially being denied bail – but he was acquitted, drawing comparisons with OJ Simpson. His bodyguard Earle Caldwell was cleared of conspiracy charges.
But when Bonny Lee Bakley’s three children sued, a judge found Blake liable for her death and ordered him to pay them $30 million, which was halved on appeal because of her criminal record before their marriage; he filed for bankruptcy and never worked again.
He was born Michael James Vijencio Gubitosi in Nutley, New Jersey, on September 18 1933; his mother was Elizabeth, née Cafone, while his factoryworker father was Giacomo, or James. The family moved to Los Angeles, and from the age of five Mickey Gubitosi, as he was initially credited, was dancing in shows alongside his two siblings in an act named the Three Little Hillbillies.
But his childhood, he recalled, was brutal: he was sexually and physically abused by both his parents, and said he was locked in cupboards and forced to eat from the floor.
He became a child actor, mostly credited as Bobby Blake, appearing in several of the “Our Gang” movie series, and by the time he had a bit part as a young Mexican selling lottery tickets in John Huston’s 1948 Western The Treasure of Sierra Madre he had made nearly 90 film appearances, including many as the Native American lad Little Beaver in the “Red Ryder” Westerns.
He went on to establish himself as a constant small-screen presence in such series as Laramie and The Naked City, then in 1967 he starred as the real-life killer Perry Smith in Richard Brooks’s film adaptation of Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. Blake had been keen to get the part, he said, because of a question in his mind: “Everybody knows what a murderer is a millionth of a second after he pulls the trigger,” he said. “But what is he a millionth of a second before he pulls the trigger?”
After some unremarkable films he had the biggest role of his career in four series (1975-78) of Baretta, winning an Emmy and a Golden Globe as Tony Baretta, an unorthodox detective often seen with his pet cockatoo Fred on his shoulder. By then he had already made a name as a reliably entertaining guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson; on one memorable occasion he goaded his fellow-guest Orson Welles for his considerable girth. Welles retorted that while he could lose weight, Blake would always be stupid.
In the mid-1980s Blake was nominated for another Emmy as a tough-talking Catholic priest in the television series Hell
Town. But while his career had flourished – despite his reputation as a difficult perfectionist – his private life was in turmoil, beset by drug abuse, which he said was a response to his childhood, and he left
Hell Town to take an eight-year break from acting while he sorted himself out. His final film role was as the malevolent “Mystery Man” in Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch’s baffling thriller about a man who may or may not have murdered his wife.
Two years later he met Bonny Lee Bakley at a nightclub, and when she gave birth to their daughter he agreed to marry her after a paternity test established that the child was his, and not Christian Brando’s (son of Marlon), as she had claimed.
Blake was her 10th husband, and she had, perhaps predictably, developed a reputation as a gold-digger; she also had a rap sheet that encompassed fraud, passing bad cheques and drug possession. They were soon living in separate houses on the same site, and Blake, witnesses later claimed, had spoken of “snuffing” her.
After his acquittal he lived quietly. “I was born lonely, I live lonely, and I’ll die lonely,” he said.
Before Bonny Lee Bakley, Robert Blake had been married to the actress Sondra Kerr, with whom he had a daughter and son; they divorced in 1983. In 2017 he married an old friend, Pamela Hudak, but they divorced the following year. He is survived by his three children.
Robert Blake, born September 18 1933, died March 9 2023