Robert Blake, the Emmy award-winning performer who went from acclaim for his acting to notoriety when he was tried and acquitted in the killing of his wife, died Thursday at age 89. A statement released on behalf of his niece, Noreen Austin, said Blake died from heart disease, surrounded by family at home in Los Angeles, the AP reports. Blake, star of the 1970s TV show, Baretta, had once hoped for a comeback, but he never recovered from the long ordeal which began with the shooting death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, outside a Studio City restaurant on May 4, 2001. The story of their strange marriage, the child it produced, and its violent end, was a Hollywood tragedy played out in court.
Once hailed as among the finest actors of his generation, Blake became better known as the center of a real-life murder trial, a story more bizarre than any in which he acted. Many remembered him not as the rugged, dark-haired star of Baretta, but as a spectral, white-haired murder defendant. In a 2002 interview with the AP while he was jailed awaiting trial, he bemoaned the change in his status with his fans nationwide: "It hurt because America is the only family I had." He was adamant that he had not killed his wife and a jury ultimately acquitted him. But a civil jury would find him liable for her death and order him to pay Bakley's family $30 million, a judgment which sent him into bankruptcy.
The daughter he and Bakley had together, Rose Lenore, was raised by other relatives and went for years without seeing Blake, until they spoke in 2019. She would tell People magazine that she called him “Robert,” not “Dad.” It was an ignominious finale for a life lived in the spotlight from childhood. As a youngster, he starred in the Our Gang comedies and acted in a movie classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. As an adult, he was praised for his portrayal of real-life murderer Perry Smith in the movie of Truman Capote's true crime best seller In Cold Blood.
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His career peaked with the 1975-78 TV cop series Baretta, for which he won an Emmy; he won another Emmy in 1993 for his role in a TV movie about John List, who killed his family in 1971. Nearly a decade later, Blake himself was accused of hiring hitmen to kill Bakley so he would get sole custody of their daughter, but evidence was muddled and a jury rejected that theory. On Bakley's last night alive, Blake, who was 67 at the time, and his 44-year-old wife dined at a neighborhood restaurant, Vitello's. He claimed she was shot when he left her in the car and returned to the restaurant to retrieve a handgun he had inadvertently left behind. Police were initially baffled and Blake was not arrested until a year after the crime occurred.
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