Cliff Robertson, Spider-Man's Uncle Ben, Dies Aged 88

By Matt Holmes / September 11, 2011

I've just woke up to some sad news this morning that Cliff Robertson, the classic Hollywood actor who immortalised Peter Parker's inspirational father figure Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, passed away yesterday, just one day after his 88th birthday. Today, September 11th 2011, was the day I was to run a few articles trying to remember those who we lost on that most dreadful of days ten years ago but now my prayers are also with Robertson's family as I recall the amazing career he had. Ironically, Robertson & The Twin Towers can be remembered together in one movie. In Sydney Pollack's excellent conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975), Robertson plays the Deputy Director of CIA New York City who is making Robert Redford's life hell and his base is an office high-up in the World Trade Center. It's quite amazing to go back and watch the film now and just see how much that building, both interior and exterior, is used to create a very specific mood. Today I won't just remember the Towers but also Robertson's role in them four decades ago, one of his most powerful screen turns. Today I will watch Three Days of the Condor and remember them both. Another Robertson classic I will re-visit is his Twilight Zone episode The Dummy, one of the absolute best the show ever produced, as he plays a ventriloquist who battles with his wooden dummy! It's a deliciously macabre and comical episode and really creepy;Robertson brought his natural valor and dignity to every role. It's his virtue that found him playing future U.S. President John F. Kennedy in PT 109 (1963), a biopic of the then naval office in the South Pacific during World War II. Roberston was hand-picked and asked personally to portray Kennedy by the man himself and was so believable, one year later he followed it up with The Best Man (1964), a political drama where Cliff played a surrogate JFK via a proposed Presidential Candidate who was a "man of the people" who tried to rid communism and "the missile gap". The movie found him going directly opposite the legendary Henry Fonda, for whom he had just starred opposite his daughter Jane in the surprisingly sexual romantic comedy Sunday in New York (1963). Robertson was the American you always believed he would make it right. His patriotism saw him play so many soldiers in World War II, another was alongside William Holden in The Devil's Brigade (1968) and Michael Caine in Too Late The Hero (1970). His crowning moment as an actor came in Charly (1968), where he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his earnest portrayal of a mentally retarded bakery worker who is experimented on in a bid to increase intelligence. The movie was an adaptation of the novel Flowers for Algernon and is particularly shocking in it's exploitation of mental disability (the film comes off as a voyeuristic and demeaning look at sufferers) but there was nothing insincere about Robertson's performance and he certainly took the role seriously and he was duly rewarded. Robertson had previously played a mentally unstable young man opposite Joan Crawford in Columbia's Autumn Leaves (1956), the movie that got him noticed as one of the more promising of the next generation of leading men. But his career didn't immediately flourish because because he didn't make it into what he would call "that golden circle of three or five in Hollywood who can pick and choose" their roles and his impressive turns on Broadway in plays such as Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending and on television in The Days of Wine and Roses, would find Marlon Brando and Jack Lemmon instead play the parts on the big screen. Despite the odd leading role and the chance to show how great he could be (which he always did), few movies post-Oscar victory were significant except for a precious few delights such as Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), his remake of Vertigo during his Alfred Hitchcock obsession that put him into the spotlight again and his turn as Hugh Heffner in the movie about the tragic Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80 (1983) and opposite Burt Reynolds in the crazy thriller Malone (1987). It wouldn't be until Sam Raimi remembered his ability to portray goodness and virtue, with a voice to inspire a superhero, that he made one of the best casting choices of his career by thrusting Robertson into the role of Uncle in Spider-Man (2002). His immortal line "With great power, comes great responsibility" makes the Raimi movies what they are and it's hard to believe they would be as powerful with another actor in the role.Watch Three Days of the Condor today if you pick up a copy or have the film on your shelf and remember the Towers and Robertson, we miss them both.