Two-time Oscar-winner Jason Robards, the craggy-faced actor best remembered for his role as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men, died on Tuesday. He was 78.
Robards, whose last big-screen role was as the dying father of Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia, died at Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut, on Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.
Robards, the son of an actor, won his Academy Awards for playing real people: the supporting roles of Post editor Bradlee in the 1976 Watergate drama and the hard-drinking, anguished detective novelist Dashiell Hammett in Julia (1977).
He often portrayed disturbed characters in films, stage and television, lending them a brooding intensity. In real life, his own fight against alcoholism and fits of depression in the 1970s seemed to mirror the turmoil of many of his characters.
"I've always played disintegrated characters," he once told an interviewer. "I don't know much about acting, but I can play those kinds of characters."
Robards was married four times, including to actress Lauren Bacall in 1961, four years after the death of Humphrey Bogart.
In 1972, Robards survived a near-fatal car crash. Several years later, he gave up drinking and his career blossomed again.
Broadway director Ellis Rabb, who worked with Robards, once called him "the greatest American actor of his time".
"Jason Robards can do anything . . . from [Eugene] O'Neill to light comedy to Shakespeare, a range we seldom see," Mr Rabb said.
Born in Chicago, Robards attended Hollywood High School in Los Angeles. He later said he passed drama class only because he was an athletics star.
He originally spurned acting, the profession of his father, and joined the navy during the second World War, earning the Navy Cross for valour.
Robards would always be known as a fine interpreter of O'Neill, notably in Iceman and Long Day's Journey Into Night. He sometimes dismissed the cinema as simply a way to make money in between stage performances.
He made his film debut in The Journey (1959) followed by Tender is the Night (1962) and the film versions of Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) and A Thousand Clowns.
His other movies included Comes a Horseman (1978) and Melvin and Howard (1979).
He is survived by his fourth wife, Lois O'Connor, and six children, including actor Sam Robards, his son by Bacall.