Arthur Roberts
Overview
Born August 10, 1938, in New York City, New York, USA
Height 6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
Mini-Bio
Arthur Roberts first fell in love with acting starring as Crichton in The Admirable Crichton at Fieldston, his New York City high school. The most beautiful girls in the class surrounding him after the curtain fell didn’t hurt either!!! While Dean’s List and on scholarship at Harvard, he found acting far more fun than studying pre-med – he thought, ” if I can just get them to pay me to do this…”
So off he went to learn his craft with the Harvard Summer Players with Faye Dunaway and Jane Alexander, and then Summer Stock all over the East Coast. At the Hampton Playhouse in New Hampshire, they paid $27 a week, which covered room and board. He then played the title roles in Mr. Roberts and Poor Richard in Pennsylvania, won the Barter Theatre award in a big New York competition for the famous Barter Theatre Virginia, did Streetcar Named Desire in Connecticut and Barefoot in the Park in Michigan, and starred in Neil Simon in Winter Rep in Buffalo and Pinter in Princeton. He got his Equity card playing in Othello with James Earl Jones and the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.
During all this, he got an MBA at NYU (a fallback option which thankfully he never used) with a prize-winning thesis ” On Why Good TV Series Stop Production and Go Off the Air.” The prize money helped buy his first Chevy convertible, which he then drove down to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to play the third lead, Lord Henry Darnley, husband and King to Inga Swenson’s “Mary,” Queen of Scots in a pre-Broadway musical tryout.
He then had a strong New York run playing Hank with the original cast of The Boys in the Band, starred on Broadway in the Tony-winning Borstal Boy, and won wide critical acclaim from all the New York critics as Karenin in Anna Karenina. On matinee days of Borstal Boy, he took great natural light headshots of fellow cast members with his Nikon and lifted his portrait photography hobby to a professional level. He starred in a wide range of intriguing independent films, enjoyed a run on the soap Secret Storm, did numerous commercials and print modeling for Wilhelmina.
He sailed thru a Nova Scotia storm for Maxim Coffee – because he, the director and the DP were on deck sailing through rain, wind and storm, they were fine; the poor ad agency folk who mistakenly stayed below became quite seasick. Bodybuilding took him to walk the Bahamas beaches with a gorgeous bikini blonde for Bahamas Tourist Board TV and print ads.
After traveling to Mexico, Greece and Europe, he came to LA in 1974 and soon guest starred in Starsky and Hutch, Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files and enjoyed a run on General Hospital as James Duvall, the scientist who invented the Ice Princess at the height of the Luke and Laura excitement. He pitched for the General Hospital softball team and played celebrity tennis.
Playing the title role in Not of This Earth proudly got him into The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1988. This and other films, among them Revenge of the Ninja, rent worldwide and give him international recognition, as do the reruns of his many TV shows.
He was a regular on the Lorenzo Lamas series Air America in 1998 — 1999. He continues to work all over the world, shooting Gargoyle with Jim Wynorski in Bucharest, Romania, Hammerhead with William Forsythe and Hunter Tylo for Avi Lerner Nu Image six weeks in Bulgaria in 2004, the Nissan Versa product launch in Canada in 2006 and a commercial for Labatt’s Canadian beer that was cast in LA and shot in Prague, Czech Republic — go figure — in 2007.
On LA stages he has starred at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Theatre Center, and as Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a huge workout… it took five weeks to learn all the words.
His most colorful recent credit was the sublime pleasure of working opposite Blythe Danner in ” I’ll See You in My Dreams,” Clips from that outrageous scene lead off his comedy demo reel. All the words were taken from a real-life speed dating situation
A strong believer in the Greek ideal of mens sana in corpore sano – a sound mind in a sound body, he enjoys weight workouts, swimming, tennis, basketball, biking and hiking and absolutely loves playing beach volleyball in Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica. Often his group is the last one standing, the only people playing volleyball as far you can see up and down the beach, stopping only when it gets too cold or too dark, whichever comes first.
An avid swimmer, he ran camp waterfronts in Maine during college summers and remembers the adventure of saving a sailor who overturned his catamaran in the Atlantic Ocean off Fire Island and was out way past where lifeguards would go… they said ” if you get in trouble out there, you’re on your own… we won’t come get you!!”
Arthur loves traveling and taking pictures on photo safaris to Kenya and Tanzania in 1999, in Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong in 2000, Prague in 2007, a grand tour of China in 2008 – the Great Wall and shooting the Yangtze River Cruise were his favorites. Since then he toured Peru , Morocco, the Greek islands, Portugal and Spain. His absolute favorite for scenic photos was multi-colorful Italy: the Mediterranean hill towns of Cinque Terre and the incomparable experience of Venice.
He has shared with his good friend and manager Phil Brock his love of framing and hanging the very best of his travel photos on the wall – so you live with your own self-made art. He loves cameras and helps friends pick out which one best to buy.
He has taught Actors’ Survival – How to Earn Your Living Acting — at UCLA and Santa Monica College and enjoys giving powerful private coaching.
