Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg; December 12, 1893 – January 26, 1973) was an American actor of stage and screen, who was popular during Hollywood's Golden Age.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Robinson was an outspoken public critic of fascism and Nazism, which were growing in strength in Europe in the years which led up to World War II.

Robinson's roles included an insurance investigator in the film noir Double Indemnity, Dathan (the adversary of Moses) in The Ten Commandments, and his final performance in the science-fiction story Soylent Green.

[13] An interest in acting and performing in front of people led to him winning an American Academy of Dramatic Arts scholarship,[13] after which he changed his name to Edward G. Robinson (the G. standing for his original surname).

Because of his physical features he was often cast as foreign characters in plays on the Broadway stage; including a Swede in Henning Berger's The Deluge (1917), a Filipino in Azelle M. Aldrich and Joseph Noll's The Pawn (1917), and a French-Canadian in Harry James Smith's The Little Teacher (1918).

[2] He played a snarling gangster in the 1927 Broadway police/crime drama The Racket, which led to his being cast in similar film roles, beginning with The Hole in the Wall (1929) with Claudette Colbert for Paramount.

Warner Bros. tried him in a biopic, Silver Dollar (1932), where Robinson played Horace Tabor; a comedy, The Little Giant (1933); and a romance, I Loved a Woman (1933).

At the time World War II broke out in Europe, he played an FBI agent in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the first American film that portrayed Nazism as a threat to the United States.

He volunteered for military service in June 1942 but was disqualified due to his age which was 48,[16] although he became an active and vocal critic of fascism and Nazism during that period.

At Paramount, he was in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, where his riveting soliloquy on insurance actuarial tables (written by Raymond Chandler) is considered a career showstopper;[clarification needed] and at Columbia, he was in Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944).

He then performed with Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945), where he played a criminal painter.

He starred in modest-budget films: Actors and Sin (1952), Vice Squad (1953), with brief appearances by second-billed Paulette Goddard, Big Leaguer (1953) with Vera-Ellen, The Glass Web (1953) with John Forsythe, Black Tuesday (1954) with Peter Graves, The Violent Men (1955) with Glenn Ford and Barbara Stanwyck, in the well-received Tight Spot (1955) with Ginger Rogers and Brian Keith, A Bullet for Joey (1955) with George Raft, Illegal (1955) with Nina Foch, and in Hell on Frisco Bay (1956) with Alan Ladd.

His career's rehabilitation received a boost in 1954, when the anti-communist film director Cecil B. DeMille cast him as the traitorous Dathan in The Ten Commandments.

After a subsequent short absence from the screen, Robinson's film career — augmented by an increasing number of television roles — re-started in 1958/1959, when he was second-billed, after Frank Sinatra, in the 1959 release A Hole in the Head.

He had support roles in My Geisha (1962), Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), Sammy Going South (1963), The Prize (1963), Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), Good Neighbor Sam (1964), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and The Outrage (1964).

However, Robinson dropped out of the project before its production began due to heart problems and concerns over the long hours that he would have needed to spend under the heavy ape makeup.

Heston, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, presented Robinson with its annual award in 1969, "in recognition of his pioneering work in organizing the union, his service during World War II, and his 'outstanding achievement in fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession.

During the 1940s he performed on CBS Radio's "Cadena de las Américas" network broadcasts to South America in collaboration with Nelson Rockefeller's cultural diplomacy program at the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

He was host to the Committee of 56, which gathered at his home on December 9, 1938, signing a "Declaration of Democratic Independence," which called for a boycott of all German-made products.

[11]: 106  Robinson was also an active member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, serving on its executive board in 1944, during which time he became an "enthusiastic" campaigner for Roosevelt's reelection that same year.

[11]: 107  During the 1940s, Robinson also contributed to the cultural diplomacy initiatives of Roosevelt's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in support of Pan-Americanism through his broadcasts to South America on the CBS "Cadena da las Américas" radio network.

[11]: 107 After the war ended, Robinson publicly spoke out in support of democratic rights for all Americans, especially in demanding equality for Black workers in the workplace.

"[11]: 128  In addition, Robinson learned that 11 out of the more than 850 charities and groups that he had helped over the previous decade were listed as Communist front organizations by the FBI.

"[11]: 121  When asked whom he personally knew who might have "duped" him, he replied, "Well, you had Albert Maltz, and you have Dalton Trumbo, and you have ... John Howard Lawson.

In 1956, however, he was forced to sell his collection to pay for his divorce settlement with Gladys Robinson; his finances had also suffered due to underemployment in the early 1950s.

[11]: 120 Robinson died of bladder cancer at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles[30] on January 26, 1973, just weeks after finishing Soylent Green, and months before he was to be given an honorary Academy Award later that year.

Eyes in The Dick Tracy Show was based on Robinson, with Mel Blanc and Jerry Hausner sharing voicing duties.