The talented, troubled actor accused of murder
Robert Blake 1933–2023
Actor Robert Blake may have been found not guilty of killing his wife, but his past did not help his case. He played real-life killers in two lauded performances: Perry Smith in the 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and an Emmy-nominated turn as an accountant who kills his family in the 1993 made-for-TV movie Judgment Day: The John List Story. A former child actor who appeared in around 40 Our Gang comedy shorts starting at age 5, he was known for being temperamental, and he spent years battling drug addiction and suicidal thoughts. He could be strikingly frank about his troubled nature. “I like my rage,” he said in a 1977 Playboy interview. “I like being pissed off at all the shitty things that are happening. I hope I never lose that.”
Born Michael James Gubitosi to Italian-American parents in Nutley, N.J., Blake later “described his childhood as a pitiless struggle,” said The Washington Post. He said his father sexually abused him, locked him in a closet, and pressed him into acting when he was just a toddler. After the family moved to California in 1938, the boy with “soulful chestnut eyes” worked steadily in Hollywood, including as Little Mickey in Our Gang and bit parts in films. His transition to acting in adulthood was rocky, but “his breakthrough role” in In Cold Blood won him “major acclaim for his sociopathic starkness.” And though he considered the small screen “unworthy of his talents,” he won an Emmy in 1975 as the lead in ABC’s Baretta, an undercover cop who “lived a fleabag life” with his pet cockatoo. His last film role came in 1997, the Mystery Man in David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
Blake was “thrust back into the spotlight” in
2001 after Bonny Lee Bakley, his wife of five months, was shot dead in his car, said Variety. Although two stuntmen testified that Blake had hired them to kill her, and other witnesses said he had threatened her, he was acquitted of the murder. He lost a subsequent wrongful death suit, though, and the $15 million judgment bankrupted him. Blake “lived quietly” after the trial, said The Telegraph (U.K.). “I was born lonely,” he said in 2012, “I live lonely, and I’ll die lonely.”