Robert Costello

Robert Costello was a producer who began his career in the era of live television in the 1950s and went on to win a Peabody Award and two Daytime Emmys for his work.

Born in Chicago, Costello grew up there and in Queens, New York, where he moved with his family at age five. After graduating from high school he matriculated at Dartmouth College in 1939. When the U.S. entered World War II, he left school to join the Office of Strategic Services, or O.S.S, where he worked in Europe and North Africa as a code-cracker.

After returning from the war, he earned an M.F.A. at Yale School of Drama. He then went to work in the theater research unit at Stevens Institute of Technology. While at Stevens, he illustrated the book Theaters and Auditoriums. Through a fluky series of events, the book led to a stint as the lighting and theater designer of a touring performance of Lippizanner stallions.

Back in America, he began working in television, with early credits such as The Gulf Playhouse, Mr. Peepers, The Secret Storm, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Armstrong Circle Theatre, which featured such performers as James Dean, Grace Kelly, Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon.

Other credits in the 1960s included The Patty Duke Show, Dark Shadows and Another World. 

In the 1970s, he was a producer of the daytime drama Ryan's Hope, for which he received three Daytime Emmy nominations and won one. He also produced The Adams Chronicles, the 1976 PBS miniseries that earned him two Primetime Emmy nominations and a Peabody.

After retiring from television in the 1980s, he became a professor at New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television.

Costello died May 30, 2014, in Amagansett, New York. He was 93.