(24 June 1936 - 7 July 2021)
Robert Downey Sr was an actor, writer, director, producer, editor and cinematographer who early on was also a minor-league baseball player, a boxing champion and an off-Broadway playwright. Born Robert John Elias Jr in New York City, the son of Lithuanian and Hungarian Jewish stock, he began making movies from 1953 on very low budgets. From the early 1960s he made a number of independent underground films which appealed to the Beat Generation audiences of the time. Putney Swope (1969), a satire of Madison Avenue and the advertising business, was the first to receive real attention with a general cinema release. Arnold Johnson played the title role and Allen Garfield, Mel Brooks and Antonio Fargas were among the enormous supporting cast, as was writer-director Downey Sr himself. Many of his films were comedies or satires on the American way of life and he took on various roles, sometimes as a writer, sometimes as a director and at other times just as an actor. During the 1970s, Downey made Pound, with humans playing mutts in a dog pound, a mockumentary that asked Is There Sex After Death?, acted as second unit director on Norman Lear's Cold Turkey, with Dick Van Dyke, and directed Up the Academy (1980), a comedy from the Mad magazine stable, among many others. He had a small part in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe, and was in Johnny Be Good (1988) starring his own son Robert Downey Jr. Downey Sr was also involved in television series such as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Matlock, Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, the sitcom 1st & Ten with O.J. Simpson, and Saturday Night Live. His last work included acting in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and the comedy Tower Heist (2011) with Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy. As a director, his last film was the 2005 documentary Rittenhouse Square, about Philadelphia’s famous park. Robert Downey Sr, who has died from Parkinson’s disease aged 85, was married three times: to the actress Elsie Ann Ford, the actress-writer Laura Ernst and the writer Rosemary Rogers. With his first wife he fathered a daughter, the actress-writer Allyson Downey, and a son, Robert Jr.
MICHAEL DARVELL
