Fond Farewell: TCM Host Robert Osborne

The film community was dealt a crushing blow yesterday, March 6th, 2017, when Robert Osborne, longtime host of the cable channel Turner Classic Movies, was taken from us at age eighty-four. A genial, familiar face to anyone who watched TCM since its inception, he is irreplaceable as not only a host, but as a resource - an endless wellspring of information - for anything cinema related.

Born in Colfax, Washington on May 3rd, 1932, Osborne (an obsessed movie fan) dreamed of a career in acting while pursuing a degree in journalism. As seen here, he worked on stage in "Night Must Fall" with no less a name than Jane Darwell (one of many key ladies who changed the course of his life), who encouraged him to continue.

After moving to New York, Osborne became a busy, familiar face in TV commercials. (His looks weren't all that dissimilar to those of singing Broadway star Robert Goulet.)

Many of the commercials he appeared in were for cigarettes, beer or coffee. They made him comfortable in front of a camera and lent him valuable experience.

The lean, handsome young man was eventually brought to Lucille Ball's attention, who placed him in her workshop theatre group and also put him to work in Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (1959.) As a personal friend of Ball's, he gained introductions to many famous Hollywood names, which taught him to be at ease amongst big name personalities.

He even found himself signed to the pilot of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) as a sidekick to Mr. Drysdale (and his secretary Miss Hathaway), but opted out of the series once it was picked up. He continued to act, however, appearing on the daytime serial The Young Marrieds (1964.)

On the advice of Lucille Ball, Osborne began to shift from acting to writing. Seen here with Hedy Lamarr, he eventually wrote a landmark reference book Academy Awards Illustrated, first published in 1965. He next began writing in any and all ways, in time becoming a celebrity interviewer for a minor publication (his first celeb? Natalie Wood, who proved quite helpful to the fledgling reporter.)

Another key lady in Osborne's life was Miss Olivia de Havilland, who liked him enough to invite him to be her escort for the American Film Institute tribute to Bette Davis, a televised event which saw him seated at the head table and even kissing Ms. Davis' hand upon their first meeting, leading to another long friendship.

Now having moved up to a regular column in The Hollywood Reporter, Osborne was the go-to guy for any story relating to the golden age of the movies and any of its stars. He wrote, among others, another well-received book called 50 Golden Years of Oscar, which he would update every five years (after first doing so ten years following initial publication.)

His reference book, an exhausting, heavily-researched record, had the daring duty of disputing Shelley Winters' claim that she'd been Oscar-nominated for A Double Life (1947) when she hadn't been (!), something he broke to her on a 1978 episode of Dinah!

Beginning in 1982, Osborne was the entertainment reporter for KTTV and, as such, was on the scene for the first notable AIDS fundraiser, a stage production of Women Behind Bars, which had many veteran actresses of women's prison pictures on hand as invited honored guests.

In this capacity, he continued to come face-to-face with iconic Hollywood names such as his own idol Lana Turner (another one of his cherished stars was Gene Tierney.) In 1984, he began to introduce films on the premium cable station The Movie Channel. This would come as expert training for a job he had never even dreamed of at this point.

Tapped to become the daytime host of American Movie Classics (AMC), it happened that Ted Turner was about to develop a channel of his own called Turner Classic Movies (TCM) that offered a different library of spellbinding older films and Osborne instead accepted a position there as the host, introducing four movies per night, seven days a week.

So it was that on April 14th, 1994 at 6:00pm Eastern Time, Robert Osborne stepped forward for the first time to introduce TCM's very first classic movie broadcast, Ted Turner's own favorite Gone with the Wind (1939.)

From that fateful day on, Osborne delivered fun facts, trivia and unparalleled historical perspective for one film after another over the course of more than 20 years. Never pretentious, always respectful without being stuffy, he helped make TCM THE place to go for commercial free, unedited, uninterrupted movies from the glory days of Hollywood. AMC in time began to break up its films with commercials and veer away from the initial direction which had inspired TCM.

He also held irregular specials called Private Screenings, in which he offered in-depth interviews with such movie legends as Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Lauren Bacall, Rod Steiger and, as shown here, Liza Minnelli and Mickey Rooney (among quite a few others.)

So significant was his contribution to the mythology of Hollywood that ultimately he was awarded a star of his own on the Walk of Fame, joining permanently with all the great names he'd cherished throughout his more than 50-year career.

There won't ever be anyone else like Robert Osborne. He didn't just know about the movies and the stars. He knew the stars themselves, intimately, and had a lifelong passion for everything associated with them. His blood must have had a small strain of silver nitrate running through it!

One of my cherished Underworld pals recently said, "I bet there are old movies in heaven." If there aren't, you can keep the place for yourself! Farewell to one of the movies' very special personalities.