Actor Robert Ginty Passes On

Robert Ginty, an actor who was a regular on both Baa Baa Black Sheep and The Paper Chase, passed on September 20 at the age of 60. The cause was cancer.

Robert Ginty was born in Brooklyn on November 14, 1948. He attended both Yale and the City College of New York. He studied acting at the Neighbourhood Playhouse in New York City. Interested in music from an early age, he eventually became a rock drummer. He even played with such legends as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. After his band appeared in a movie, Ginty was encouraged to go into acting.

Robert Ginty appeared in regional theatre early in his career. In 1972 he was the understudy on the Broadway plays The Great God Brown and Don Juan. He worked for a time as the assistant to Broadway producer Harold Prince. In the early Seventies he moved to Los Angeles. There he made his first appearances on television in episodes of Nakia and The Rockford Files in 1974. Ginty guest starred on the shows Police Woman, Joe Forrester, and Jigsaw John. He also appeared in the films Two Minute Warning and Bound for Glory. It was in 1976 that he became one of the original, regular characters on Baa Baa Black Sheep. He played Lt. T. J. Wiley on the show for nearly the entirety of its run. It was in 1978 that he became a regular on the television series The Paper Chase, on which he played Thomas Craig Anderson.

It was in 1980 that Robert Ginty played the lead in the film The Exterminator. A low budget film of the Death Wish genre, The Exterminator performed very well at the box office. Ginty appeared in similar, low budget action films, such as Scarab, Programmed to Kill, Three Kinds of Heat, and Code Name Vengeance, and The Bounty Hunter. He also appeared in the low budget sci-fi film Warrior of the Lost World and the horror movies The Alchemist and Maniac Killer. Ginty continued to appear in TV shows, including Simon and Simon and Knight Rider. He was a regular on the show Hawaiian Heat in 1983 and appeared for a story arc on Falcon Crest. In the Nineties Ginty appeared in the movies Madhouse, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, Lady Dragon, and The Prophet Game. He appeared on the shows Murder She Wrote and In the Heat of the Night.

Ginty also directed movies and television shows. He directed the low budget action films The Bounty Hunter and Vietnam, Texas. He also directed episodes of the shows Dream On, China Beach, Evening Shade, Xena Warrior Princess, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Charmed, and Tracker.