The enduring character actor's career began on the Broadway stage in the 1950s but he quickly began mixing it up on television where he starred in a few short lived TV shows and made numerous guest appearances over the past five decades (!). His first big screen role (uncredited) was as "Frankie Peppo" in the Paul Newman classic Somebody Up There Likes Me but his film career didn't hit its peak until the 1980s with a string of hits including An Officer and a Gentleman, Scarface, Prizzi's Honor, and the comedy Big with Tom Hanks.
Though the earliest Oscar ceremony memory I have is Shirley Maclaine winning (1983), the first Oscar race I actively followed was in 1985, the year Robert Loggia was nominated for the courtroom thriller Jagged Edge. Now in the paleozoic pre-internet era "actively following" the race was much different. It required 1) going to movies that adults thought were great and 2) reading a few articles in weekly and monthly magazines about who might be nominated. That's it! [More...]
with Glenn Close in JAGGED EDGE (1985)
I had seen Jagged Edge in movie theaters solely for Star Man Jeff Bridges (♥) and curiousity about 'this Glenn Close person' who was suddenly famous as an Oscar darling for reasons I didn't understand. At the time I was most definitely not allowed to see R rated movies but 1985 was the year I started sneaking into them. Since Glenn Close was only in R rated movies I had only seen her once before in The Natural (1984) -- Robert Redford was mom-approved and the baseball drama was PG. I was confused by Glenn Close's Oscar nomination months later; budding actressexual me thought Barbara Hershey and especially Kim Basinger were the main attractions. Then came Robert Loggia's nomination which was also a head scratcher. In short: my first two Glenn Close movies were altogether mystifying Oscar experiences. Actually all of Glenn Close's movies have been mystifying Oscar experiences -- how did she lose for Fatal Attraction AND Dangerous Liaisons again?
(Let us never again speak of Albert Nobbs.)
But we were talking about Robert Loggia! I remember literally nothing about The Jagged Edge except a weird obsession with its literally jagged edged poster so I can't vouch for an opinion about it or my non-response to Loggia.
F Murray Abraham (a year before his Oscar win) and Robert Loggia (two years before his Oscar nomination) in SCARFACE (1983)
Surely Robert Loggia's best remembered movie scene. BIG (1988) with Tom Hanks
I hadn't yet clocked the grand and/or aggravating (depending on the movie/performer) Academy tradition of giving enduring character actors a thank you nomination for both a job well done and their entire career to date even if nobody much cared about the movie itself otherwise (Jagged Edge received no other nominations).
Later of course it became more obvious that Robert Loggia had the goods. RIP