Within a few years of his New York stage debut as the rear end of a cow in Jack and the Beanstalk, Jason Robards, who died on December 26th aged 78, was voted Broadway's most promising actor. The award by the New York drama critics had, by the actor's own acknowledgement, been hard earned.
It was the first of many accolades during a long and distinguished career, including Oscars in consecutive years for All The President's Men (1976) and Julia (1977). And while he never achieved star status as a conventional leading man, he notched up more than 100 films and television movies, and was regarded as one of the finest stage actors of his generation, notably in the plays of Eugene O'Neill.
His passion for work may have been inspired by his father, Jason Robards snr, who amassed well over 200 screen credits between 1921 and his death in 1963. The family acting tradition continues with Jason Robards III, a son from his first marriage to Eleanor Pitman, and Sam Robards, a son from his third marriage to Lauren Bacall.
Jason Robards was born in Chicago, but found his formative years interrupted by the second World War, during which he served in the US navy, surviving the attack on Pearl Harbour.
After demobilisation, he studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His stage career included appearances in Gilbert and Sullivan, plus a rigorous year-long tour as the lead in Stalag 17. But it was O'Neill that established his name, first playing Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, then, during the 195657 Broadway season, triumphantly tackling the part of the alcoholic son Jamie in Long Day's Journey Into Night.
He repeated the role in Sidney Lumet's 1962 film of the marathon play. And 20 years later, Jason Robards directed the play on Broadway while playing the tyrannical father, James Tyrone. Not surprisingly, after his east coast success, Hollywood beckoned, and he made his movie debut in the turgid The Journey (1959). Throughout the next four decades his wry, laidback style became a fixture on television and in movies, and his expressively rasping voice and rather forbidding demeanour enhanced films as bad as Any Wednesday (1966) and Raise the Titanic (1980), and as memorable as Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and Magnolia (1999).
Throughout a substantial early period of his career, he divided his time between stage and screen, sometimes creating roles such as the misfit in A Thousand Clowns before transferring the play to cinema (in 1965). From 1980 on, he made more than 60 films and television appearances - not, it should be added, always of the highest quality.
Among his best work was a characteristically soulful Doc Holliday in Hour of the Gun (1967), and a sturdy Brutus in a lacklustre Julius Caesar (1970); in the same year he starred as the eponymous prospector in Sam Peckinpah's elegiac The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
The 1970s provided him with his best parts (before Magnolia). He was the father in Dalton Trumbo's dark, pacifist work, Johnny Got His Gun (1971), played James Tyrone again in a television adaptation of A Moon for the Misbegotten (1975), following it with his two Oscar-winning films.
In the political thriller All the President's Men he was memorably cast as Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor, controlling his crusading reporters during the uncovering of the Watergate scandal. He followed this pivotal role with a major television series, Wash- ington: Behind Closed Doors, and in 1977 received his second Oscar as best supporting actor for an uncannily lifelike portrayal of the writer Dashiell Hammett, in Julia.
Jason Robards brought authority to his characters, and inevitably became something of a specialist in factual roles. He was President Roosevelt, and twice played both Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. For his quirky portrayal of Howard Hughes in Melvin and Howard (1980) he received a third Oscar nomination, and for both this and the title role in Sahkarov (1984) he received Golden Globe nominations as best actor.
There were several notable cameo roles (uncredited) in films, including the murdered congressman in the brutal opening to Enemy of the State (1998). A year later he took the key role of the bedridden father in Magnolia. This mesmerising performance as Earl Partridge showed that he had lost none of his power or authority, and it set something of a seal on his legion of crusty characterisations.
He is survived by his fourth wife, Lois O'Connor, and his four sons and two daughters.
Jason Nelson Robards: born 1922; died, December 2000