Robert Young

Robert George Young (February 22, 1907 – July 21, 1998) was an American television, film, and radio actor, best known for his leading roles as Jim Anderson, the father of Father Knows Best (NBC and then CBS) and as physician Marcus Welby in Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC).

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Young was the son of an Irish immigrant father (Thomas E. Young) and an American mother (Margaret Fife). When Young was a child, the family moved to Seattle and then to Los Angeles where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School. After graduation, he studied and performed at the Pasadena Playhouse while working odd jobs and appearing in bit parts in silent films. While touring with a stock company production of The Ship, Young was discovered by an MGM talent scout and signed to a contract. He made his sound film debut for MGM in the 1931 Charlie Chan film Black Camel.

Young appeared in over 100 films between 1931 and 1952. After appearing on stage, Young was signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—the studio that had more stars than in the heavens—and in spite of having a “tier B” status, he co-starred with some of the studio’s most illustrious actresses such as Margaret Sullavan, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Helen Hayes, Luise Rainer, and Helen Twelvetrees, among many, many others. Yet most of his assignments comprised B-movies, also known as programmers, which required a mere two to three weeks of shooting. Actors who were relegated to such a hectic schedule appeared, as Young did, in some six to eight movies per year.

As an MGM contract player, Young was resigned to the fate of most of his colleagues—to accept any film assigned to him or risk being placed on suspension—and many actors on suspension were prohibited from earning a salary from any endeavor at all (even those unrelated to the film industry). In 1936, MGM summarily loaned Young to Gaumont British for two films; the first was directed by Alfred Hitchcock with the other co-starring the luminous Jessie Matthews, and while there he surmised that his employers intended to terminate his contract. But he was mistaken.

He unexpectedly received one of his most rewarding roles late in his MGM career, in H.M. Pulham, Esq., featuring one of Hedy Lamarr’s most effective performances, and once remarked that he was assigned only those roles which Robert Montgomery and other A-list actors had rejected.

After his contract at MGM ended, Young starred in light comedies as well as in trenchant dramas for studios such as 20th Century Fox, United Artists, and RKO Radio Pictures. From 1943, Young assayed more challenging roles in films like Claudia, The Enchanted Cottage, They Won’t Believe Me, The Second Woman, and Crossfire. His portrayal of unsympathetic characters in several of these latter films — which seldom occurred in his MGM pictures — was applauded by numerous reviewers.

Not surprisingly and in spite of a propitious beginning as a freelance actor without the nurturing of a major studio, Young’s career began an incremental and imperceptible decline. Still starring as a leading man in the late 1940s and early 1950s but in mediocre films, he subsequently disappeared from the silver screen, only to reappear several years later on a much smaller one.

Today, Young is most remembered as the affable insurance salesman in Father Knows Best (1949-1954 on radio, 1954-1960 on television), for which he and his co-star, Jane Wyatt, won several Emmy Awards. Elinor Donahue (“Princess”), Billy Gray (“Bud”), and Lauren Chapin (“Kitten”) played the Anderson children.

Young then created, produced, and starred with Ford Rainey and Constance Moore in the nostalgia CBS comedy series Window on Main Street (1961–1962) which barely lasted six months.

Young’s final television series, Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–1976), co-starring a young James Brolin, earned Young an Emmy for best leading actor in a drama series.

He also made numerous television commercials, in which he persuaded edgy people to drink Sanka coffee, until the late 1980s. —Wikipedia