Edward Goldenberg Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg; December 12, 1893 – January 26, 1973) was an American actor who was popular during Hollywood's Golden Age. After making his stage debut in 1913, he rose to stardom with his performance as the title character in Little Caesar (1931) and became well known for his portrayals of gangsters. He starred in a variety of films, including the biopics Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and A Dispatch from Reuters (both 1940) and the film noirs Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window (both 1944).
During the 1930s and 1940s, Robinson was an outspoken public critic of fascism and Nazism, which were growing in strength in Europe in the years which led up to World War II. His activism included contributing over $250,000 to more than 850 organizations that were involved in war relief, along with contributions to cultural, educational, and religious groups. His postwar films include The Stranger (1946) and Key Largo (1948), and he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor for House of Strangers (1949).
During the 1950s, Robinson was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare, but he was cleared of any deliberate Communist involvement. He did not name names but renounced a number of leftist organizations so as not to be probed further. As a result of being investigated, he found himself on Hollywood's graylist, people who were on the Hollywood blacklist maintained by the major studios, but could find work at minor film studios on what was called Poverty Row. He returned to the A-list when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as Dathan (the adversary of Moses) in The Ten Commandments (1956).
During his 60-year career, Robinson appeared in 30 Broadway plays, and more than 100 films. In 1956, he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Middle of the Night. He played his final role in the science-fiction story Soylent Green (1973). Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited him as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. He received an Academy Honorary Award for his work in the film industry, which was awarded two months after he died in 1973. In 1999, he was ranked number 24 in the American Film Institute's list of the 25 greatest male stars of Classic American cinema.
Robinson was born Emanuel Goldenberg (Yiddish: עמנואל גאָלדענבערג) on December 12, 1893, in a Yiddish-speaking Romanian Jewish family in Bucharest, the fifth and penultimate son of Sarah (née Guttman) and Yeshaya Moyshe Goldenberg (later called Morris in the U.S.), a builder and tinsmith. He had five brothers: Zach, Jack, Oscar, Willie, and Max. The family lived in one of several attached buildings surrounding a court at 671 Strada Cantemier in Bucharest. Emanuel, known as "Manny", was close to his maternal grandmother, who lived with them and often told him stories from the Hebrew Bible. He was enrolled at a Jewish school, where he studied the Torah and learned Hebrew and German. Once, his father took him to a see a film, a silent Western, but both thought motion pictures were just "a passing fad." At a Bucharest café they saw a Romanian play based on Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days: "I loved that, and I thought the actors were making up the words."
According to the New York Times, one of his brothers was attacked by an anti-semitic gang during a "schoolboy pogrom". In the wake of that violence, the family decided to emigrate to the United States. Robinson arrived in New York City on February 21, 1904. "At Ellis Island I was born again," he wrote. "Life for me began when I was 10 years old." He grew up on the Lower East Side, and had his bar mitzvah at the First Roumanian-American Congregation. He 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 his 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 had heard the surname "Robinson" in a play and liked "the ring and strength of it", and for the given name he chose "Edward" after King Edward VII. Despite the fact that he emigrated to the US at 9 years old, Robinson remained fluent in Romanian his entire life: during a 1966 trip to Romania, in an interview with Contemporanul, he demanded the journalists to speak Romanian, not English, claiming that he understood everything.
He served in the United States Navy during World War I, but was not sent overseas.
Robinson made his professional stage debut playing a character named Sato in a production of Paid in Full, which opened in April 1913 in Binghamton, New York. He then joined a Cincinnati stock company called The Orpheum Players for 22 weeks and played various roles in many plays, including two different characters in Alias Jimmy Valentine. "I was becoming adept at doubling—that is, playing two parts in one play, in suitable disguises. I did it all season," he later wrote. Robinson's next stage appearance was as the guide Nasir in a touring production of Kismet that took him to Ottawa and Montreal before closing in November 1914.
In 1915, Robinson made his Broadway debut at the Hudson Theatre in Archibald and Edgar Selwyn's production of the play Under Fire, written by Roi Cooper Megrue. He played four roles in Under Fire: "They were all bit parts, but I portrayed a French spy, a Belgian peasant, a Prussian soldier and a Cockney private. I became known as the league of nations." Under Fire ran for six months and the Selwyns hired Robinson for the role of a prisoner in their production of another play written by Megrue, Under Sentence. After Under Sentence, he played a wide range of characters, including a Filipino in Azelle M. Aldrich and Joseph Noll's The Pawn (1917), a German soldier in Drafted (1917), a Swede in Henning Berger's The Deluge (1917), and a French-Canadian in Harry James Smith's The Little Teacher (1918). The Little Teacher was a success, but he left the production to enlist as a sailor in the United States Navy. He went to Pelham Bay Naval Training Station and also applied to enter naval intelligence. During this time, Robinson thought films were "scarcely an art form" and believed "the living theater was the only theater and all the rest was nonsense."
When World War I ended, Robinson went back to the stage and toured with the Garrick Players of Washington, D.C. He returned to Broadway in 1919 with a role in First is Last, "the first and only time" he played an Anglo-Saxon on stage. In 1920, he was cast in productions of Maxim Gorky's Night Lodging and Booth Tarkington's Poldekin. In November, Arthur Hopkins gave him a role in a play titled Samson and Delilah, starring Jacob Ben-Ami. He disliked his performance in the silent film Fields of Glory and producer Sam Goldwyn cut it out. In the summer of 1921, he performed in five plays at the Elitch Theatre in Denver, Colorado. He liked his role as Mendel in The Idle Inn (1921) and also played in the 1922 revival of The Deluge. Following a return to Denver's Elitch Theatre for the summer of 1922, Robinson accepted a role in Alfred Savoir's Banco, with Alfred Lunt in the title role. Film director John S. Robertson offered Robinson the supporting role of Domingo Escobar in the silent film The Bright Shawl (1923), which was based on a Joseph Hergesheimer novel of the same title. Robinson traveled to Havana, Cuba, for the filming and was paid the equivalent of a stage actor's 20-week salary. He later remembered, "In any case, The Bright Shawl was not nearly as heartrending an experience as Fields of Glory. Still, the manufacture of a movie seemed silly and unrewarding to me." In 1923, he appeared in four Broadway productions: Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, starring his friend Joseph Schildkraut; Elmer Rice's avant-garde The Adding Machine; Ferenc Molnár's Launzi, with Pauline Lord in the title role; and A Royal Fandango, starring Ethel Barrymore.