Robert Francis Logan

Robert Logan

May 29, 1941 - May 6, 2024

Actor, filmmaker and loving father Robert Francis Logan passed into the arms of God on May 6, 2024, three weeks shy of his 83rd birthday.

The eldest of eight siblings, Robert - known to friends and family as Bob - was born on May 29, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York to Frank Logan, a banker, and Catherine Logan (nee Quigley), a homemaker, where he spent eight years playing in the streets of Flatbush before the family set out for California.

They settled in Los Angeles, where Bob attended Serra High School, excelling in athletics, particularly baseball. It was there that he met Father Jorge Da Silva, who remained a cherished mentor and friend until his death in 2001 and, in doing so, instilled a deep spirituality and abiding faith that Robert carried through the end of his own life.

His prowess on the pitching mound at Serra attracted the attention of a scout from the Chicago White Sox, who arranged an athletic scholarship at the University of Arizona, but a coaching change at the university abruptly scuttled the plan just as he arrived on campus. Stunned and disheartened, he decamped for home to attend LA City College and plan his next moves.

It wasn't long before his life took a sharp and ultimately serendipitous turn at a late-night restaurant, where he caught the eye of a talent scout from Warner Brothers, who, leaving his business card, suggested he audition. Still smarting from the debacle in Arizona, he dismissed the opportunity as a fraud and stuffed the card in his pocket. A few weeks later his mother found it while sorting laundry and forced him to the studio gates. Her intransigence would set the stage for a multi-decade career and a life brimming with adventure.

The studio quickly placed Bob in his breakout role as the hip, slang-talking carhop J.R. Hale on the hit detective series 77 Sunset Strip, and he soon racked up a series of appearances and guest starring roles on other popular shows like Daniel Boone. Despite the successes, he wasn't a natural fit for Hollywood and made it clear he preferred it that way. Fiercely independent, contemptuous of flattery and facade, he barely stomached a year in the industry's grueling social scene before recoiling into the solitude of a small beach shack on what was then an undeveloped stretch of Malibu's Latigo Shore Drive, as far from the studios as he could manage.

Pressed against the sea day and night, it became the object of his affection: he took up sailing, and, throwing himself into it, soon joined the crew of the racing yacht Ticonderoga during their record-setting trans-Pacific run to Tahiti in 1966. But he was restless still and felt electrified when a colleague returned from Europe describing it as a place of anonymity, a blank slate to reinvent himself outside of the studio's manufactured image.

With that aim in mind, he successfully auditioned for a supporting role in the World War II epic The Bridge at Remagen, which had secured an unorthodox filming arrangement with the government of Czechoslovakia, led by Alexander Dubcek, a bold and independent leader who was riling his minders in Moscow. After a few weeks enjoying the sights and sounds of Western Europe, Bob and the rest of the cast and crew streamed into Prague with their period-correct American tanks and Jeeps but managed just a few days of filming before they found the streets crawling with very real troops from the Soviet Union and its satellites as the Prague Spring bloomed all around them.

Bob rushed with the rest of the production to the Austrian border, but he couldn't bring himself to cross. Refusing to abandon the local friends he had made during the past few days, he borrowed the crew's scouting camera and hailed a ride back to Prague, where he filmed the protests and ensuing repressions, taking as his daily commute a harrowing route to-and-from the Barrandov Studios in the city outskirts to develop and review his film. After over a week on the streets, he helped the skeleton staff of the US embassy extinguish the building's burning roof after their flurry of document burning set it alight. The embassy, in turn, smuggled his film to independent Austria in a sealed diplomatic pouch, where it gave the Western public some of the first independent proof of Czechoslovakia's fate.

Now the Old Continent had overdelivered on Bob's expectations; LA didn't stand a chance. He spent the next decade there in his halcyon days: he studied pottery making in the south of France under the guidance of the legendary Beatrice Wood, he surfed off the coast of Biarritz, learned to pilot a helicopter, poorly, above the Calabrian hills, interviewed wayward Americans held in Spanish and Moroccan prisons for hash smuggling, and strolled the boulevards of Paris with fellow disillusioned Hollywood refugees, striking up particularly close friendships with Sterling Haydn and Jean Seberg.

Bob had never been a fan of the classroom but possessed a singular intellectual curiosity and a voracious appetite for heady books. In Europe he found himself living in the company of the authors themselves and he set about closely observing their ways of thinking, with a particular interest in how they diagnosed the world around them. He relished every minute. That period of cultural immersion sparked a creative outpouring that would leave him pounding away at keyboards on dozens of screenplays, right up until the morning of his passing.

But eventually the music had to stop. He'd only saved so much from his earlier career and would need facilities to edit and sell the footage from Spain and Morocco into a proper documentary. Besides, he didn't go a day without missing his cherished young daughter, Courtney.

A ticket home appeared soon enough: his brief post-TV resume of small, adventuresome roles in genre dramas made him a shoo-in to play the patriarch of the urban Robinson family, who, fed up with the grime and pollution suffocating America's cities, cast out into the Rocky Mountain wilderness to build a cabin and live in communion with their surroundings. What's more, their ethos - equal parts idealistic, independent and impractical - was largely his own. After all, his on-screen turn as a father, which he played with a mix of reckless adventurousness, stoicism, wry humor and profound tenderness, wasn't really so fictional.

The resulting film, The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, was a breakaway hit, propelling Bob to the height of his stardom and spawning a series of sequels and adjacent films in similar settings like Across the Great Divide and The Sea Gypsies. Tapping directly into the same return-to-nature national zeitgeist as John Denver's music, each one took modest budgets and returned millions in ticket sales: for a time two of his films appeared in the box office top 10 simultaneously.

The phone kept ringing, and he spent much of the 1970s on set, the accumulating fame and fortune allowing the Brooklyn kid a taste of the finer things. He settled alternately in Aspen and Santa Barbara, where he found time to pick up the sport of kings and earn a two-goal handicap. In his later years, though, he wouldn't reminisce about the parties or glamour but instead the solitude and majestic vistas of hikes through the Transverse Range and long hours in his beloved red single-cab F-350 as he trailered a stable of polo ponies between the two hideaways.

As the decade ended, Bob found success and frustration in equal measure. He sold promising screenplays to several studios only to see each linger in development as a revolving door of executives seemed to green-light and halt productions on a coin flip. He kept busy on TV pilots and smaller projects, including 1984's Kelly, a father-daughter bildungsroman and thinly veiled idealization of his relationship with his own daughter, now grown.

His last major role would be as a rocket engineer and jilted husband in 1986's A Night in Heaven. Never mind the movie: settling into his seat en route to film it, his eyes fell on Alina Milián, a Cuban-American Pan Am stewardess and fashion model. He never really looked away. Bob was a professional bachelor but none of his liaisons had ever possessed his gentle mother to grab him by the wrist and growl "Bobby, you marry that woman." He did just that, and in photos from their 1985 wedding he smiles sheepishly, apparently stunned himself that he'd found the love of his life. Once again for Bob, his mother's push had been decisive.

Travelers at heart, Ali and Bob spent the rest of the decade doing mostly that, spending months at a time in the Serengeti, Rio de Janeiro, the Ionian Sea; but in its waning years, they returned to Santa Barbara, where Bob's athletic passion turned - after all, why not? - to competitive road cycling. In 1988 Alina gave birth to his son Anthony, and Bob retired from acting for good.

Unsurprisingly, retirement didn't suit him. A friend from years past, the former sheriff of Aspen, had made an improbable career change to deep-sea treasure hunting, and soon Bob was rekindling his love for documentary-making on a ship just off the Ecuadorian coast, where he'd dive camera in hand through a dizzying swirl of Hammerhead sharks attracted to billowing blood washed off the decks of local fishing skiffs to the wreck of a 300-year old Spanish treasure galleon. Returning home to his anxious family, he assembled a documentary for A&E and, as the millennium ended, he left Santa Barbara for the last time.

Now firmly enthralled with the theme of treasure hunting, he moved to southeast Florida where he lived with his wife, son and doting mother-in-law as he completed two additional documentaries on the subject before finally settling into a happy and quiet life writing screenplays and setting off on small adventures, usually on a bicycle alongside his son.

Here, as a father, his talents shined most brightly. At times it could feel like he was born to effortlessly navigate the contradictions inherent in a father-son relationship: he was at once strong and principled, kind and generous, bursting with unstoppable joie de vivre, patient, conscientious and unflappably supportive. He seemed proudest when his son fulfilled a generations-long Logan dream by graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and was delighted when Anthony married his college sweetheart four years later.

Ali tirelessly cared for him in his later years as he navigated and ultimately overcame several health scares. Each time, over her protests, he would insist on saddling up his beloved mountain bike well before he was fully recovered, and he rode it under the hot Florida sun like a man fifty years his junior. He would keep to walking, however, when visiting his granddaughters in Chicago, who in his last years were his joy, and he theirs.

To his family, he was the embodiment of agape, literally the Platonic ideal of spousal or familiar love. They felt so lucky, so blessed, to experience that; so lucky and so blessed to know him.

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Bob was preceded in death by his parents, Frank and Catherine, his sisters Maureen Messrah and Carol Dawson, his brother Francis Logan Jr., his niece Brittany Bertram and his nephew by marriage Scott Wilson.

He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Alina, his daughter Courtney Worthington, son Anthony and daughter-in-law Hayley, his three granddaughters, Elsa Worthington and Ingrid and Alma Logan, and his siblings Logan (Patty) Lahey, Theresa Bertram, Janet Haines, Timothy Logan and many nieces and nephews whom he loved dearly.

Bob is interred at the Cedar Grove Cemetery on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, and would request donations, in lieu of flowers or other condolences, for the Notre Dame Club of Miami, where he was an active member, to be used for need-based scholarships and the club's local charitable work.