LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jason Robards: Iceman Cometh
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Robards had a serious drinking problem for years, and in 1972, after losing the role of Hickey to Lee Marvin in the film version of "The Iceman Cometh," he was in a horrifying accident on a winding California road. He drove his car into the side of a mountain and almost died. After extensive surgery and facial reconstruction, he recovered. While he was recuperating, a call came to do "A Moon for the Misbegotten" with Quintero and Dewhurst for a brief summer season in Lake Forest, Ill.
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This tribute honors Robards in two parts. Part One presents recent interviews of the late actor as well as articles by Arthur and Barbara Gelb which appeared in the New York Times on the occasions of the American premier of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) and of the successful production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Colleen Dewhurst (1974). Sheila Hickey Garvey writes of the 1956 production of Iceman and gives a brief history of Robards’ work with the Circle in the Square Theatre, the theatre that began the Off Broadway theatrical movement of the 1950s. Stephen A. Black, Michael Manheim and Edward Shaughnessy write of seeing Robards perform in O’Neill plays. The O’Neill bibliographers Madeline Smith and Richard Eaton analyze the effect Robards’ performances have had on subsequent performances and on scholarship about O’Neill’s later plays. Zander Brietzke writes about the problem of performing O’Neill in the post–Robards era.
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Born July 26, 1922, in Chicago, Robards was a military man before becoming an actor. He served seven years in the Navy, and was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked in 1941 (he later received the Navy Cross). Following his service, Robards moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He found work in incidental plays, radio soap operas, and live television dramas, driving a cab and teaching school to support himself. After a decade of obscurity, he rose to prominence in 1956 in the Circle in the Square production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. He appeared on Broadway the following year in Long Day's Journey Into Night, for which he won a New York Drama Critics Award.
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Robards decided to get into acting after the war. His career started out slowly. He moved to New York City and found small parts there, first in radio and then on the stage. His big break was landing the starring role in the 1956 off-Broadway production and 1960 television film of The Iceman Cometh, as the philosophical salesman Hickey.
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Iceman Cometh