Robert Stack entered the world on January 13, 1919, in Los Angeles, California, though the name on the birth record — Charles Langford Modini Stack — would not survive his infancy. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Wood, had selected the name Charles, partly as a nod to the family's musical heritage: her own father was the opera singer Charles Wood, who had studied voice in Italy and performed there under the stage name Carlo Modini. Stack's father, James Langford Stack, a wealthy owner of an advertising agency, had other ideas and renamed the boy Robert. The elder Stack died when Robert was only ten, but not before the couple had divorced when their son was a year old, remarried, and then seen their marriage dissolve once more.
The circumstances of Robert Stack's early childhood were unusual enough to shape him profoundly. His mother took him to Europe, where he spent his formative years in Adria and Rome, absorbing the languages and cultures of Italy and France with the ease that only very young children possess. By the time he returned to Los Angeles at the age of seven, Robert Stack was fluent in French and Italian but had not yet mastered English. The experience gave him a cosmopolitan self-possession that would serve him well in Hollywood, even if the studio system initially had little idea what to do with a young man whose linguistic loyalties were decidedly Mediterranean.
Beyond language, Stack developed other remarkable skills in his youth. He became an avid polo player and a particularly gifted skeet shooter. At sixteen he joined the All-American Skeet Team, and he went on to set two world records in the sport, eventually winning the national championship. He and his brother claimed the International Outboard Motor Championships in Venice, Italy. In 1971, long after his acting career had made his face familiar to millions of Americans, he was inducted into the National Skeet Shooting Hall of Fame — a recognition that honored the sportsman he had been before the cameras found him.
Stack's entry into film came through a combination of good timing and photogenic luck. While visiting Universal Studios at the age of twenty, he caught the attention of producer Joe Pasternak, who offered him a small screen test alongside the teenage star Helen Parrish. Stack took the part and was launched into the industry almost immediately. His first film, First Love, paired him with Deanna Durbin and made a modest cultural splash for a reason that seems almost quaint in retrospect: Stack became the first actor ever to kiss Durbin on screen, a moment that generated considerable public discussion in 1939. He subsequently appeared in The Mortal Storm at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1940, a thoughtful anti-Nazi film directed by Frank Borzage and starring Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart, in which Stack played a young German who is seduced into joining the Nazi party.
Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, Stack accumulated credits steadily if not spectacularly, working across studios and genres. His breakthrough toward genuine prestige came in 1956, when director Douglas Sirk cast him in Written on the Wind, a melodrama of oil money and psychological dissolution set in Texas. Stack's performance as the tortured, self-destructive Kyle Hadley earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and critics recognized in his work a capacity for inward suffering that his earlier heroic roles had not demanded.
The role that would define Stack's public image for an entire generation arrived in 1959, when he took on the lead in the ABC television series The Untouchables, playing Eliot Ness, the real-life federal agent who had led the Chicago Prohibition-era campaign against gangster Al Capone. The show, which ran until 1963, was enormously popular and launched Stack into genuine stardom. His performance earned him the 1960 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Series. His clipped, authoritative delivery and unflappable bearing made Eliot Ness one of the iconic figures of early American television drama.
Stack's second major television triumph came decades later, when he became the host and narrator of Unsolved Mysteries, a true-crime and paranormal series that aired from 1987 to 2002. His grave, measured voice — the same voice that had commanded attention through all those years of drama — proved ideally suited to the program's atmosphere of solemn fascination. The show became a cultural institution, and Stack's presence gave it a quality of gravitas that helped distinguish it from more sensationalistic competitors.
Between his two landmark television careers, Stack found an unexpected comedic gift. In 1980, the spoof film Airplane! cast him as Captain Rex Kramer, playing the role with such committed deadpan intensity that his performance became one of the film's most celebrated elements. The willingness to parody his own stern image demonstrated a lightness of spirit that endeared him to audiences who might otherwise have found his dramatic persona a little intimidating.
Away from the screen, Stack was a man of broad engagement with public life. Clark Gable was a family friend during his childhood. He became a Republican and took an active interest in civic affairs. In 1953, the Piikani Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy honored him by inducting him into their chieftainship with the name Chief Crow Flag. In 1962, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. His autobiography, Straight Shooting, cowritten with Mark Evans, captured the warmth of his private character — he included a photograph of himself with his mother captioned, simply, "Me and my best girl."
Robert Stack died on May 14, 2003, in Los Angeles, at the age of eighty-four. He had appeared in more than forty feature films and left behind two television roles — the incorruptible federal agent and the grave chronicler of unsolved mysteries — that had embedded themselves permanently in the American imagination.
