Robert Warwick

Robert Warwick
Born	Robert Taylor Bien 9 October 1878 Sacremento, California U.S.
Died	6 June 1964 (aged 85) West Los Angeles, California U.S.
Occupation	actor
Years active	1903-1960
Spouse(s)	Stella Lattimore (?-? divorced) Josephine Whittell (?-? divor.) Arline Peck (?-1909 divorced)

Robert Warwick (9 October 1878–6 June 1964) was an American stage, film and television actor with over 200 film appearances.

Early life and career

Warwick was born Robert Taylor Bien in 1878. Handsome and with a booming voice Warwick trained to be an operatic singer, but acting proved to be his greater calling. He made his Broadway debut in 1903 in the play Glad of It. One of his co-stars in this play was a young John Barrymore, also making his Broadway debut. Both men quickly became matinee idols. For the next twenty years Warwick appeared in such plays as Anna Karenina (1906), Two Women (1910), with Mrs. Leslie Carter, The Kiss Waltz (1911), Miss Prince (1912), in both of which he was able to display his opera-trained singing voice, The Secret (1913), A Celebrated Case (1915) and Drifting (1922) with Alice Brady, not to mention several other plays through the end of the 1920s.

Film career

Warwick started making silent films in 1914. He made numerous productions in the 1910s primarily in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Two films, Alias Jimmy Valentine and A Girl's Folly, both directed by Maurice Tourneur have been preserved, and showcase Warwick as a silent actor, as well as Tourneur's directing talent, and both are available on home video. From the 1920s on Warwick alternated doing plays and silent films. He was fifty when sound films arrived, and now middle aged with his matinee idol appeal fading, he found plenty of work in character roles where his splendid voice recorded well. This eventually necessitated his moving permanently to California to be near the film studios when they moved to Los Angeles. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Warwick's dependable acting and resonant voice ensured that he was seldom out of work. His immense filmography includes such classics as The Little Colonel (1935) with Shirley Temple, Anna Karenina (1936) with Greta Garbo – which he had played on stage in 1906 – The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938 with Errol Flynn, and the movie for which he's probably best remembered and most beloved, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941).

Television and later life

Warwick made numerous appearances on television almost from its initial popularity in the late 1940s. In his seventies he was still hard at work and made appearances on every type of television show from westerns like Broken Arrow to the Loretta Young Show. Warwick was married several times. Divorced from his first two wives, he survived his third, actress Stella Lattimore (1905-1960), before dying in June 1964 in Los Angeles at the age of 86. By his first wife he had one daughter, Rosalind, who bore him two grandchildren, and with his second wife another daughter, Betsey, who was a prominent published poet in Los Angeles and was buried next to her father at Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles in 2007. His and his wife Stella's headstones are engraved "Beloved Father" and "Beloved Mother".

External links

• Robert Warwick at the Internet Broadway Database
• Robert Warwick at the Internet Movie Database
• Robert Warwick at Allmovie
• Robert Warwick at the TCM Movie Database
• Robert Warwick photos at NYP Library
• Robert Warwick at Findagrave
• old post card of Robert Warwick