Cliff Robertson

Cliff Robertson, the American actor who won an Oscar for Charly and later helped expose a Hollywood studio embezzlement scandal, died in Stony Brook, New York, on September 10, 2011 — one day after his eighty-eighth birthday. He had been in frail health after a procedure. Born Clifford Parker Robertson III in La Jolla, California, on September 9, 1923, he served in the Merchant Marine, studied at Antioch, and built a career that moved between Broadway, live television, and film. Charly (1968) gave him the Academy Award for a performance that treated intellectual disability and enhancement as tragedy rather than stunt. He played John F. Kennedy in PT 109 while the president still lived — a casting choice that required Kennedy's own approval — and decades later returned to popular memory as Ben Parker in the Spider-Man films. In the late 1970s he reported a forged studio check bearing his name, a decision that stalled his career even as it forced reforms. He flew, sailed, and kept a Long Island life that looked nothing like red-carpet habit. Colleagues remembered a professional who could be stubborn about principle and generous about craft. He died in Stony Brook on September 10, 2011. The Oscar and the whistleblowing both belong to the same man: someone who preferred the hard version of a story to the convenient one.