Robert Colbert

Tall, virile American TV leading man of the 1960s and 70s, born in Long Beach, California, the youngest of three siblings of Clarence Loy Colbert Jr. (1902-1962) and Helena M. Colbert (née Gorman, 1900-1990). As a youth, he attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School, excelling both academically and as an athlete in track and field. During his school years, he first discovered his aptitude for acting. He studied theatre arts at the University of California, Berkeley, prior to military service with U.S. troops stationed on the island of Okinawa. While working in a clerical position with a Military Police unit, Colbert sidelined as a disc jockey for the prominent local radio station KSBK in Naha, which often hired Americans and tended to promote the latest in American pop music. Colbert was paid two dollars an hour, four nights a week. Though financially lucrative, he quit the radio job when a woman in the Air Force, who had heard his voice on the airwaves, prompted him to try out for a stage production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. This firmly hooked him on acting. Following his army discharge, Colbert honed his newly acquired skills in Shakespearean roles with the Portland Repertory Theater in Oregon. While staging the performance of a play at a supper club, he was approached by the comic actor and singer Mickey Shaughnessy with an offer to travel to Hollywood to meet his agent. For a guy who had at different times worked as a furniture mover, ditch digger, bulldozer driver and kitchen appliance salesman, the offer proved irresistible. Signed under contract by Warner Brothers, Colbert made his screen debut in 1957. He had a few minor film roles before becoming a regular guest actor in many of the Warners' TV series on the ABC network, including multiple appearances as different characters in Bourbon Street Beat (1959), Colt .45 (1957), Bronco (1958), Hawaiian Eye (1959) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958). He particularly liked being in westerns and had a great fondness for horses. Colbert appeared three times on Maverick (1957) during season four, the first time as suspected stage coach robber "Cherokee" Dan Evans, then twice as Brent, a third brother of Bret Maverick (famously played by James Garner, to whom Colbert bore more than a passing resemblance). After five years of acting in nearly all of the studio's series, Colbert asked to be released from his WB contract. He had accrued a debt of $80,000, due to a failed restaurant investment, and wished to avoid his salary being claimed as part of the encumbrance. Warners obliged. In 1966, Colbert's agent helped him arrange a meeting with writer/producer Irwin Allen, and he was consequently cast as Dr. Doug Phillips, co-starring alongside James Darren (as Dr. Anthony Newman) in the ground-breaking cult science fiction series The Time Tunnel (1966). In his own words: "It was the best show because it was like an anthology every week, with a different cast." In each episode, the two lead characters, lost in time due to a malfunction in the experimental time device, were thrust into a different historical (or, less often, future) event. Five minutes before the episode ended, they would find themselves transported to a new scenario, thereby a new cliffhanger was created for the audience. Though quite entertaining and a big hit with viewers, Time Tunnel suffered from historical inaccuracies and excessive use of stock footage. When the head of ABC was fired and new management came into play, the series was abruptly cancelled after a single season. Despite the setback, Colbert remained gainfully employed on the small screen. He made a few more forays into the sci-fi genre: as a relentless interrogator in Land of the Giants (1968), one of the leads in the TV movie City Beneath the Sea (1971) (a failed pilot for a projected Irwin Allen series about an underwater city), and in a segment of the spoof Amazon Women on the Moon (1987). He was featured in several episodes of Mannix (1967), had a ten-year stint as a regular character on the soap The Young and the Restless (1973) and rounded off his career with guest spots on Frasier (1993) and Baywatch (1989). Retired since 1995, Colbert continues to make appearances at science fiction and western conventions across America.