Cliff Robertson

Clifford Parker Cliff Robertson III was an American actor with a film and television career that spanned half a century. Robertson portrayed a young John F. Kennedy in the 1963 film PT 109, and won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the movie Charly. On television, he portrayed retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the 1976 adaptation of Aldrins autobiographic Return to Earth, played a fictional character based on Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms in the 1977 miniseries Washington Behind Closed Doors, and portrayed Henry Ford in the 1987 Ford The Man and the Machine. His last wellknown film appearances were in 2002 through 2007 as Uncle Ben in the SpiderMan film trilogy.

Robertson was born on September 9, 1923 in La Jolla, California, the son of Clifford Parker Robertson, Jr. , and his first wife, the former Audrey Olga Willingham . His Texasborn father was described as the idle heir to a tidy sum of ranching money. Robertson recalled that his father was a very romantic figuretall, handsome. He married four or five times, and between marriages hed pop in to see me. He was a great raconteur, and he was always surrounded by sycophants who let him pick up the tab. During the Depression, he tapped the trust for 500,000, and six months later he was back for more. The actors parents divorced when he was one, and Robertsons mother died of peritonitis a year later in El Paso, Texas at the age of 21. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Eleanor Eleanora Willingham , in California, and rarely saw his father. He graduated in 1941 from La Jolla High School, where he was known as The Walking Phoenix. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II

Source: Wikipedia