Jason Robards, 78, one of the most honored and admired of American actors, a performer of haunting depth and power for more than 40 years on stage and in the movies, where he won two Academy Awards, died yesterday at a hospital in Bridgeport, Conn. He had cancer.
One of his Oscars for supporting actor came for his 1976 portrayal of Washington Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee in the "All the President's Men," a film about the newspaper's role in exposing the Watergate scandal. His second Oscar came the next year for his role as novelist Dashiell Hammett in "Julia."
Last year, Robards was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.
In the American theater, he was perhaps the premier interpreter of the work of playwright Eugene O'Neill, whom he admired as the American Shakespeare. It was often said that the turbulence of his own life--he struggled through much of his career with alcoholism, depression, injury and other afflictions--suited him particularly for playing O'Neill, who shared many of his psychic struggles.
After playing Hickey in an off-Broadway revival of O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" in the spring of 1956, he electrified Broadway that fall with his performance in the first stage production of O'Neill's harrowing "Long Day's Journey Into Night."
That performance earned Robards the first of eight nominations for the Tony award, Broadway's highest honor.
He formerly was married to film star Lauren Bacall.
In Hollywood over the years, he played almost every kind of film role, from comedy, as in "A Thousand Clowns," to tragedy, as in "Julius Caesar." He played gangsters (Al Capone) and generals, U.S. presidents (Abraham Lincoln) and western gamblers (Doc Holliday in 1967's "Hour of the Gun").
By one count, he was in 97 theatrical and television films, many of them dominated by his dark and penetrating glance and his slightly rasping voice.
In addition to the Oscars he received, he was nominated for a third for his portrayal of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes in "Melvin and Howard" (1980). Last year, although he was severely ill, he appeared in "Magnolia."
A man who recognized himself as compelled to act, Robards said he preferred the stage to the screen. One thing he liked about the stage, he said, was that "once you're on, nobody can say, 'Cut it.' You're out there on your own, and there's always that thrill of a real live audience."
In the same vein, he expressed the view that the stage, where he appeared in works by Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and Harold Pinter, provided greater opportunity to grow into a role.
"You learn all the lines," he once said, "and then begins the creative process. I once worked on a play nine months and got to know it--'A Touch of the Poet,' one of the beautiful plays. Every night I went out, and it opened up to me."
Despite his success in film, Robards appeared to be uneasy with the Hollywood cult of celebrity. He took a self-effacing delight in recalling how his stage career had started. It began after he returned from Navy service during World War II, having survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, and spent time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He played the hind end of a cow in a children's theater version of "Jack and the Beanstalk."
"They didn't trust me with the front end, I think," he said. "Didn't think I could act well enough."
Grindingly difficult years passed before Robards's talent was ready and was recognized. He did what broke and aspiring actors do: He lived in a cold-water flat in New York's West Village. He drove a taxicab. He found occasional work on radio, in soap operas. He took parts on live television when they were available. He spent time soul searching. "I was about to give up," he said.
But O'Neill was a favorite whom he had read in the Pacific during wartime breaks. When he learned that director Jose Quintero was planning a revival of "Iceman," Robards persuaded Quintero to cast him in it.
"It was just one of those things you feel you must do," he said. "I just had to do it. Even though I was only getting $25 a week to be in it."
"Iceman" marked the start of what is regarded as one of the great careers in the American theater. But even after the successes of 1956, struggles lay ahead.
By 1958, a first marriage had broken up. Drinking had become a problem. Robards said he felt himself burdened by guilt.
At one point in the early 1970s, he told an interviewer, he found himself in Hollywood, not working steadily, unhappy, "an actor waiting for a phone call."
The offer to appear in "All the President's Men" has been regarded as a kind of turning point for the actor.
In a climactic scene, Robards, as Bradlee, tells his reporters to pursue the story even though it looks as though Watergate is going to lead to Nixon himself: "Nothing is at stake except freedom of the press, free speech and possibly the future of the country."
Robards gave a rounded performance, which combined such lofty rhetoric with nuanced touches, long looks that conveyed wordless anger, thought or frustration. And he showed some swagger, too, in a memorable shot in which he walked from the newsroom with a copy of the newspaper's first edition slapping against his leg.
The two 1970s Oscars opened additional opportunities, giving him more film roles and more parts on the stage as well.
He was born in Chicago on July 26, 1922. He later moved to California, where his father, Jason Robards Sr., was working in the movies. In his teens, he was an athlete at Hollywood High School.
Robards married Eleanor Pitman in 1948. After their divorce, he married Rachel Taylor, from whom he was divorced in 1961. He was married to Bacall from 1961 to 1969, and in 1970, he married Lois O'Connor.
He and Pitman had three children, and he had a son, actor Sam Robards, with Bacall, and two children with O'Connor.
