Saturdays with the Stars: Robert Young

Each month of 2022 we will be taking a look at one-time film actors who became foundational figures in the early days of television, stretching from the early 1950's into the mid-1960's.  Last month we talked about Ann Sothern, who spent much of the 1940's getting cast in movie serials or B-parts, never really getting to the A-list potential of her acting talents until she found a second act in television.  This month, we are going to look at a man who spent much of the 1930's & 40's playing second fiddle to some of the biggest names in Hollywood, mostly for MGM, before a turn in radio got him not one but two of his most iconic & remembered roles in television.  This month's star is Robert Young.

Born the son of Irish immigrants in Chicago, Robert Young spent most of his childhood moving around the country with his family, eventually ending up in Los Angeles, where as a young man he would get extra work in silent pictures.  He was discovered by an MGM talent scout, and made his feature film debut in 1931's Black Camel.

Young, in some ways, is similar to Ann Sothern in that he was a proper leading man in his era, but unlike Sothern, he didn't really have a lot of movies that he opened on his own.  Young was more likely to be the romantic interest of women like Joan Crawford & Hedy Lamarr, whose names were the true draw on the marquee, not Young's.  After he left MGM, he enjoyed some success as a freelance artist, including making critically-regarded films like The Enchanted Cottage and Crossfire, but this didn't last, and by the early 1950's, he found himself in radio & television, playing insurance salesman Jim Anderson in Father Knows Best.  This would be a huge hit for both CBS & NBC (it spent most of its run network-hopping) and would lead Young to national prominence & a new lease on stardom.  This allowed him to not just make Father Knows Best, but his equally-loved Marcus Welby, MD, which allowed Young to be one of the only people to win Emmys as a series regular for both a comedy and a drama.  This month, though, we're going to look at Young's film career (which, to be fair, we've actually done a little bit of if you check out his label), and try to see if we can find out why film audiences didn't notice what television found so apparent.