SoapZone Community Message Board

Chris Robinson, ‘12 O’Clock High,’ ‘General Hospital’ and ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ Actor, Dies at 86
In a career that lasted more than 60 years, he appeared in films with Burt Lancaster and Ted Cassidy. And in a commercial for cough syrup, he noted he wasn’t a doctor but played one on TV.

Chris Robinson, who starred as a World War II bomber pilot on the 1960s ABC drama 12 O’Clock High and had lengthy stints on the daytime soap operas General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful, has died. He was 86.

Robinson died Monday on his ranch near Sedona, Arizona, actor and musician MJ Allen announced on Facebook. They worked together on the 2022 film Just for a Week.

During an acting career that spanned eight decades, Robinson worked alongside Burt Lancaster in The Young Savages (1961) and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), both directed by John Frankenheimer, and with Addams Family icon Ted Cassidy in four films, all of which he directed.

The Florida native also starred as Vietnam vet Tim Ochopee, a Seminole with a pet rattlesnake who obeys his commands (for most of the movie, anyway), in the Everglades-set horror film Stanley (1972), from Crown International Pictures.

Robinson joined the cast of the Quinn Martin-produced 12 O’Clock High as Technical Sgt. Sandy Komansky for its second season in September 1965. (Also coming on board as a full-time castmember that year: Paul Burke as Col. Joe Gallagher.) He appeared on the final 46 episodes of the show through January 1967.

ADVERTISEMENT
On ABC’s General Hospital, he portrayed Dr. Rick Webber (two-time husband of Denise Alexander‘s Lesley and adoptive father of Genie Francis’ Laura) from 1978-86. He came back in 2002, only to have his character bludgeoned to death with a candlestick by Scotty Baldwin (Kin Shriner), Laura’s former husband.

Robinson also played Jack Hamilton, who enjoyed romances with Stephanie Douglas (Susan Flannery) and her rival Sally Spectra (Darlene Conley), on CBS’ The Bold and the Beautiful from 1992-2002, with a final appearance in 2005.

While he was working on G.H. — and after showing up in Garry Marshall’s soapy Young Doctors in Love (1982) — Robinson established his bona fides as a pitchman in a Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup commercial. “I’m not a doctor,” he noted, “but I do play one on TV.”

But when he encountered legal trouble related to income tax evasion, he was replaced by Peter Bergman, another TV doctor on another soap (All My Children).

Chris Robinson and his pet in 1972’s ‘Stanley.’ Courtesy Everett Collection
Born on Nov. 5, 1938, in West Palm Beach, Florida, Christopher Brown Robinson appeared uncredited in the Tony Curtis-starring The Midnight Story (1957). Two years later, he played a teenage thug in The Diary of a High School Bride and the spider-like monster in Gene Corman’s Beast From Haunted Cave, wearing a costume he had designed.

Robinson stayed busy after that, guest-starring on such series as Colt. 45, Hennesey, The Donna Reed Show, Sea Hunt, Death Valley Days, Ben Casey, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train and The Fugitive before landing on 12 O’Clock High.

He starred as an albino slave who is on the run with his brother (Anthony Scott) from a plantation owner (Cassidy) in Catch the Black Sunshine (1974), which he also wrote and directed, then did similar triple duty on Thunder County (1974), The Intruder (1975) and The Great Balloon Race (1977).

Talking about The Intruder — which also featured Mickey Rooney and Yvonne De Carlo — in a 2017 interview with Nick Thomas, Robinson said he cast it, put the crew together and shot it in a mere six weeks.

Asked what became of the movie, Robinson replied: “I have no idea. I wasn’t involved in the editing and didn’t even see the finished film, which was never released. I moved on to other projects and just forgot about it.”

Robinson’s big-screen résumé also included Because They’re Young (1960), The Long Rope (1961), Shootout at Big Sag (1962), Lady in Cement (1968), The Cycle Savages (1969), The Hawaiians (1970), Revenge Is My Destiny (1971), Amy (1981), Savannah Smiles (1982) and Just for a Week (2022).

Click here for a video tribute to his career.

In 1985, Robinson pleaded guilty to federal income tax evasion but was allowed to continue on G.H. by serving his sentence on nights and weekends. In between that soap and The Bold and the Beautiful, he portrayed Jason Frame on NBC’s Another World from 1987-89.

He married his fourth wife, Jacquie, in April 2011. Survivors also include his children, Shane, Coby, Christian, Christopher, Chris and Taylor, and grandchildren Ivy, Ava, Davey, Brooks and Knox.

His son Chris opened a window into the family by producing and directing two documentary shorts: Bankrupt by Beanies (2009), about his dad buying many thousands of Beanie Baby plush toys with the goal of reselling them at a profit, and Bastard: An Illegitimate Film (2010), which explored his “complicated” family tree (his father had his nine kids with six women).

Chris revealed in Bastard that he was “conceived in [his dad’s] dressing room in General Hospital” and pointed out that his father “practically had as many relationships in his real life as he’s had in the movies.”

“No matter how we came to be, all of us are connected,” Chris, talking about his siblings and half-siblings, said in closing the documentary. “And when our father is gone, even as some of us don’t even consider him to be their father, we’ll still have each other to look to for love and support. It might not be normal, but it’s certainly a hell of a lot more interesting.”