Robert Ginty

Robert Ginty — Biography

Born in Brooklyn on 14 November 1948, Robert Winthrop Ginty was steeped enough in music as a young man to play drums alongside Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Carlos Santana and John Lee Hooker; he studied at Yale and the City College of New York, trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio, and was hired as an assistant by Harold Prince after Prince saw him perform at a 1973 summer theatre festival.

Before moving to Hollywood in the mid-1970s he worked in regional theatre and on Broadway, then took supporting parts in Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory and Coming Home and had a recurring role on The Paper Chase. His starring turn in James Glickenhaus's The Exterminator (1980) made him an action-film lead, and through the early 1990s he headlined pictures such as The Act, White Fire, Mission Kill and Programmed to Kill; he also founded his own production company, Ginty Films, directing and starring in low-budget international productions such as Gold Raiders, shot in Thailand, and Cop Target, shot in France.

In the 1990s he turned mainly to directing episodes of shows including China Beach, Xena: Warrior Princess, Nash Bridges and Charmed, and in his final years worked as a theatre director in Canada, France, Ireland and Italy while serving as an artist in residence at Harvard. Married to actresses Francine Tacker and Lorna Patterson, with a son, actor James Francis Ginty, Ginty died of cancer in Los Angeles on 21 September 2009.