Robert Culp

In 1965 Robert Culp began one of the most popular series in the history of television, I Spy, which co-starred the then-unknown comedian Bill Cosby. In the three years the show was on the air, Culp received an Emmy nomination for Best Writing, and he and Cosby were nominated for Emmys as Best Actor every year.

It was also the first time a black man and a white man had co-starred as buddies in the history of the theatre.

Almost 30 years after the series, Culp and Cosby re-teamed for a two-hour I Spy reunion MOW for CBS. That same year, Culp co-starred as the President in the feature film of John Grisham's runaway best seller The Pelican Brief for Warner Brothers, written and directed by the late Alan Pakula.

Culp spent 12 years on the stage before he set foot in front of a camera. He's had a remarkable career in feature films, television, live and filmed, off- Broadway theatre and Broadway itself. He is a multi-talented actor/writer/director.

On Broadway, when Culp was first starting out, he played with Katherine Cornell in The Prescott Proposals, and opposite Kim Stanley in A Clearing In The Woods.

He wrote and directed numerous I Spy episodes as well as Operation Breadbasket and The Greatest American Hero for ABC.

Robert Culp was born in Berkeley, California, on August 16, 1930. His grandfather set out from Green County Tennessee in 1887 with a donkey, a cart, and another kid, and walked to California, to the gold fields. In his life he became a professional hunter, trapper, gold-miner, carpenter, cabinet-maker, electrician, house-builder, game warden and cowpuncher. By the time Robert was 12, his grandfather had taught him the basics of elemental anthropology, archaeology, geology, ecology, entomology, physics, chemistry, politics, logic, ethics, morality, and history.

Culp's family and friends rolled their eyes a lot when he announced, while still in high school, that he was going to be an actor. Only his grandfather approved, saying he was convinced the boy could do "anything he set his mind to." That same year, 1947, Culp's first short story was published.

In 1951, after attending the University of Washington in Seattle, Culp and his first wife moved to New York. For the next six years, he worked in radio, theatre and on live television in New York, eventually winning the first "Obie" ever given to "The Best Actor of the Y ear" for his performance as HE in the Russian classic He Who Gets Slapped, off-Broadway. Within months he moved to Los Angeles to star in his first TV series, a half-hour western called Trackdown.

After Trackdown, Culp refused to take another series, concentrating instead on his writing. That changed with I Spy, although Culp did write seven I Spy episodes, including the one that became the pilot for the series.

Of all his work, Culp says that Operation Breadbasket, a documentary about Black economics in America, is his favorite. He produced, directed, wrote, and narrated the project, financing it out of his own pocket. He sold it to ABC-TV, the first and only time a network had ever purchased a hard news documentary from an outside source.

Most recently, Culp has taken to the film festival circuit to draw attention to an independent feature film he made this past summer, The Almost Guys, which he insists he had more fun doing than anything in the last decade, saying, "This one is the indie prod equivalent of Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice in its sense of a new kind of comedy, far out on the curve. Somebody said a good actor has three unique performances to play with over a lifetime. This is the one nobody ever asked me to do before. Long hours, no sleep, six-day weeks, but such wonderful, courageous people to work with I didn't want it to end."