Robert Sterling (1917-2006)

Alias:
William Sterling Hart

Birthplace:
New Castle, Pennsylvania, USA

Born:
November 13, 1917

Died:
May 30, 2006

Robert Sterling, born William Sterling Hart (November 13, 1917 – May 30, 2006) was an American film and television actor.  The son of baseball player and umpire Bill Hart, he was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a clothing salesman before pursuing an acting career.  After signing with Columbia Pictures in 1939, he changed his name to Robert Sterling to avoid confusion with silent western star William S. Hart. In 1941, Sterling went to MGM. He worked steadily as a supporting player for several years. After serving in World War II as an Army Air Force flight instructor, he returned to Hollywood, but by the end of the decade, his film career had faltered. He did, however, play the non-singing role of Steve Baker, opposite Ava Gardner as Julie, in the hit MGM 1951 film version of Show Boat.  Sterling later revived his acting career on the small screen with numerous appearances on Television.

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While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.