Robert Blake, TV’s Baretta Who Was Tried for Murder, Dies at 89

variety.com:

Carmel Dagan Actor Robert Blake, a man with a long and complex legacy, has died, according to the Associated Press. The former child actor was best known for his Emmy-winning role as the cockatoo-owning undercover cop in the popular 1970s TV series “Baretta” and, more infamously, for his trial following the 2001 murder of his wife.

He was 89.As reported by the AP, Blake died from heart disease on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. These two aspects of Blake’s legacy were inseparable in some ways, and the personal turmoil that made the latter at least circumstantially plausible (the case against Blake hinged on motive — he may have wanted to be free of his rocky marriage) fueled his acting.

Blake was acquitted of the murder charge, as well as of one count of soliciting murder, in his criminal trial in 2005, but in a civil trial later that year, he was found liable for the wrongful death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, and ordered to pay her family $30 million, a sum later halved by an appeals court. (Blake filed for bankruptcy in 2006.) Upon news of Blake’s possible involvement in Bakley’s murder, many remarked about the “eerie” similarity to the actor’s most famous film role in Richard Brooks’ 1967 adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel-as-reportage “In Cold Blood,” in which Blake and Scott Wilson played the young killers of an entire Kansas family.

Speaking in a 2011 interview with Tavis Smiley, Blake acknowledged, “If I weren’t so sick and so troubled, I might not have been an actor.”“Baretta” creator Stephen J.