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'Untouchables' Actor Robert Stack Dies

Thursday, May 15, 2003
(12:33 PM)
By Lynn Elber
Associated Press Writer

The young man had a resonant speaking voice and rugged good looks, enough to catch the eye of producer Joe Pasternak when Stack ventured onto the Universal lot at age 20. “He said 'How'd you like to be in pictures? We'll make a test with Helen Parrish, a little love scene.' Helen Parrish was a beautiful girl. 'Gee, that sounds keen,' I told him. I got the part,” Stack recalled.

Robert Stack is shown in this undated handout photo.
Image Credit: Monty Brinton/CBS -- AP File Photo

Los Angeles -- AP
Robert Stack, whose granite-eyed stare and menacing baritone spelled trouble for television's fictional criminals in “The Untouchables” and real ones in “Unsolved Mysteries,” died at his home. He was 84.

Stack's wife Rosemarie found him slumped over at about 5 p.m. Wednesday. He died of heart failure, she said. The actor had undergone radiation treatment for prostate cancer in October.

“He was feeling so good,” she said Thursday. “He had a bout with a tumor but that was gone. It wasn't that, it was his heart. He was too weak. He wouldn't have lived through a bypass.”

Although he had a lengthy film career beginning in 1939 with “First Love,” Stack's greatest fame came with the 1959-63 TV drama “The Untouchables,” in which he played Chicago crimebuster Eliot Ness and won a best actor Emmy.

That role, coupled with his job as host of the reality series “Unsolved Mysteries,” created an enduring good-guy image.

“I think there's a definite carry-over from Eliot Ness,” Stack said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press. “Somebody once said, 'You really think you're Eliot Ness.' No, I don't think I'm Ness, but I sure as hell know I'm not Al Capone.”
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2003 © The Associated Press.

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