Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (Broadway Theatre Archive)

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Jason Robards burst onto the Broadway scene in 1956 with his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s devastating Iceman Cometh, playing the central role of Hickey, a salesman who comes to a rundown bar on a mission to bring peace to its boozing denizens by lifting their illusions–only to wreak disaster on them and himself. Four years later, director Sidney Lumet (later to direct such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and Network) made this skillful television version of the play, bringing back Robards, along with a sterling collection of character actors (particularly Myron McCormick as a former communist who comes to see his reasonableness as a form of cowardice) and a young Robert Redford (in a strikingly unheroic role). Robards became famous for his roles in many O’Neill plays; his galvanizing performance drives The Iceman Cometh and makes this production one of the landmarks of television drama. –Bret Fetzer

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Jason Robards became an overnight star with his indelible performance as the glad-handing, doom-ridden Hickey in the legendary 1956 Circle-in-the-Square revival of Eugene O’Neill’s towering masterpiece. In his harrowing drama, O’Neill shines a harsh but compassionate spotlight on the failed lives, empty hopes, and perpetual pipe dreams of an assortment of down-and-out denizens of a seedy saloon, set in New York in 1912. Their sad, but complacent existences are rattled when Hickey arrives for his annual bender a changed man–forswearing alcohol and preaching a deliverance from “the lie of the pipe dream.”