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Filmography
1916
Arms and the Woman
1923
The Bright Shawl
1929
The Hole in the Wall
1930
Night Ride
A Lady to Love
Outside the Law
East Is West
The Widow from Chicago
1931
The Stolen Jools
Smart Money
Five Star Final
1932
The Hatchet Man
Two Seconds
Tiger Shark
Silver Dollar
1933
The Little Giant
I Loved a Woman
1934
Dark Hazard
The Man with Two Faces
1935
Barbary Coast
1936
Bullets or Ballots
1937
Thunder in the City
Kid Galahad
The Last Gangster
1938
A Slight Case of Murder
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
I Am the Law
1939
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
Blackmail
1940
Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet
Brother Orchid
A Dispatch from Reuter’s
1941
The Sea Wolf
Manpower
Unholy Partners
1942
Larceny, Inc.
Tales of Manhattan
1943
Destroyer
1944
Tampico
Mr. Winkle Goes to War
The Woman in the Window
1945
Journey Together
1946
1947
The Red House
1948
All My Sons
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
1949
House of Strangers
1950
Operation X
1952
Actors and Sin
1953
Vice Squad
Big Leaguer
The Glass Web
1954
Black Tuesday
1955
The Violent Men
Tight Spot
A Bullet for Joey
Illegal
Hell on Frisco Bay
1956
Nightmare
The Ten Commandments
1959
A Hole in the Head
1960
Seven Thieves
1962
My Geisha
Two Weeks in Another Town
1963
Sammy Going South
The Prize
1964
Robin and the 7 Hoods
Good Neighbor Sam
Cheyenne Autumn
The Outrage
1965
The Cincinnati Kid
The Blonde from Peking
Grand Slam
Operation St. Peter’s
1968
The Biggest Bundle of Them All
Never a Dull Moment
It’s Your Move
1969
Mackenna’s Gold
1970
Song of Norway
1972
Neither by Day Nor by Night
1973
Soylent Green
Awards
Robinson was never nominated for an Academy Award, but in 1973 he was awarded an honorary Oscar in recognition that he had “achieved greatness as a player, a patron of the arts and a dedicated citizen … in sum, a Renaissance man”. He had been notified of the honor, but died two months before the award ceremony, so the award was accepted by his widow, Jane Robinson.
Edward G Robinson: Learn more about him, review his filmography and more
Robinson was born as Emanuel Goldenberg to a Yiddish-speaking Romanian Jewish family in Bucharest, the son of Sarah (née Guttman) and Morris Goldenberg, a builder.
After one of his brothers was attacked by an antisemitic mob, the family decided to emigrate to the United States. Robinson arrived in New York City on February 14, 1903. He grew up on the Lower East Side, had his Bar Mitzvah at First Roumanian-American Congregation, and attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York, planning to become a criminal attorney. An interest in acting and performing in front of people led to him winning an American Academy of Dramatic Arts scholarship, after which he changed his name to Edward G. Robinson (the G. standing for his original surname).
He served in the US Navy during World War I, but was never sent overseas.
He began his acting career in the Yiddish Theater District in 1913 and made his Broadway debut in 1915. In 1923 made his named debut as E. G. Robinson in the silent film, The Bright Shawl. He played a snarling gangster in the 1927 Broadway police/crime drama The Racket, which led to his being cast in similar film roles. One of many actors who saw his career flourish in the new sound film era rather than falter, he made only three films prior to 1930, but left his stage career that year and made 14 films between 1930–1932.
Robinson went on to make a total of 101 films in his 50-year career. An acclaimed performance as the gangster Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello in Little Caesar (1931) led to being further typecast as a “tough guy” for much of his early career, in works such as Five Star Final (1931), Smart Money (1931; his only movie with James Cagney and Boris Karloff), Tiger Shark (1932), Kid Galahad (1937) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart , and, in a send-up of his gangster roles, A Slight Case of Murder.
In 1939, at the time World War II broke out in Europe, he played an FBI agent in Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first American film which showed Nazism as a threat to the United States. He volunteered for military service in June 1942 but was disqualified due to his age at 48, although he became an active and vocal critic of fascism and Nazism during that period.
The following year he played Paul Ehrlich in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Paul Julius Reuter in A Dispatch from Reuter’s (1940), both biographies of prominent Jewish public figures. Meanwhile, throughout the 1940s Robinson also demonstrated his knack for both film noir and comedic roles, including Raoul Walsh’s Manpower (1941) with Marlene Dietrich and George Raft; Larceny, Inc. (1942) with Jane Wyman and Broderick Crawford; Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck ; opposite Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945); and Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) with Welles and Loretta Young . Robinson appeared for director John Huston as gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (1948), the last of five films he made with Humphrey Bogart and the only one in which Bogart did not play a supporting role.
His career rehabilitation received a boost in 1954, when noted anti-communist director Cecil B. DeMille cast him as the traitorous Dathan in The Ten Commandments. The film was released in 1956, as was his psychological thriller Nightmare. After a subsequent short absence from the screen, Robinson’s film career—augmented by an increasing number of television roles—restarted for good in 1958/59, when he was second-billed after Frank Sinatra in the 1959 release A Hole in the Head. The last scene Robinson filmed was a euthanasia sequence, with friend and co-star Charlton Heston, in the science fiction cult film Soylent Green (1973); he died only twelve days later.
Robinson married his first wife, stage actress Gladys Lloyd, born Gladys Lloyd Cassell, in 1927; she was the former wife of Ralph L. Vestervelt and the daughter of Clement C. Cassell, an architect, sculptor and artist. The couple had one son, Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (a.k.a. Manny Robinson, 1933–1974), as well as a daughter from Gladys Robinson’s first marriage. In 1956 he was divorced from his wife. In 1958 he married Jane Bodenheimer, a dress designer professionally known as Jane Arden. Thereafter he also maintained a home in Palm Springs, California.
In noticeable contrast to many of his onscreen characters, Robinson was a sensitive, softly-spoken and cultured man, who spoke seven languages. Remaining a liberal Democrat despite his difficulties with HUAC, he attended the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, California. He was a passionate art collector, eventually building up a significant private collection. In 1956, however, he was forced to sell his collection to pay for his divorce settlement with Gladys Robinson; his finances had also suffered due to underemployment in the early 1950s.
Robinson died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles of bladder cancer on January 26, 1973. Services were held at Temple Israel in Los Angeles where Charlton Heston delivered the eulogy. Over 1,500 friends of Robinson attended, with another crowd of 500 people outside. His body was then flown to New York where it was entombed in a crypt in the family mausoleum at Beth-El Cemetery in Brooklyn.
In October 2000, Robinson’s image was imprinted on a U.S. postage stamp, its sixth in its Legends of Hollywood series.
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