Andrew Robinson was Hollywood's screen psychopath for twenty years before Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gave him Garak, a Cardassian tailor who lied about everything and whom we liked anyway. It is the part he was built for, and the one to see.
Fi1m perspective
Garak, the Cardassian who runs the tailor's shop on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), is friendly to everyone and honest with no one. He has a past in intelligence that he neither confirms nor denies, and every kindness he does seems to have a second purpose he does not mention. Andrew Robinson plays the friendliness straight and lets the rest show only when the story turns a light on it. We never believed a word Garak said and looked forward to every scene he was in, which is exactly the effect a spy pretending to be a tailor ought to have.
It was a long road to that shop. Robinson began as a stage actor and playwright in New York in the late 1960s, and his first film part was Scorpio, the killer in Dirty Harry (1971). He was good enough at it to be offered little else for years; the industry decided he was the disturbed man in the supporting cast and kept him there. He had to wait until Hellraiser (1987), as Larry Cotton, for a first lead. The pattern is plain in the credits: a trained actor asked to be frightening on cue.
Garak, from 1993, was both the escape and the vindication. The menace he had been typecast for was still there, but now it sat under a layer of charm, and the layer was the performance. Robinson has said that the truth of the character was "like a glacier: you saw only the tip of the glacier", and across 37 episodes the writers gave him room to let a little more surface each time. Our view of the series is that it became the best drama Star Trek has made once its neighbours started pressing in. Garak was a neighbour who had moved in early, and he is one of the reasons that pressure feels real.
He also went behind the camera, starting with the 1996 Deep Space Nine episode 'Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places', then two episodes of Voyager and seven of Judging Amy. It is a modest directing list and we will not pretend it changes the picture. More telling is the novel A Stitch in Time (2000), in which he wrote Garak's life himself, a fair sign that he thought the part deserved more than the episodes had room for. Alongside that he founded the Matrix Theatre Company, directed there, and taught in the MFA programme at USC for fourteen years.
The career is not a kind story about casting directors. Give a stage actor one memorable maniac and he will be offered maniacs until he is past fifty; give him a tailor who might be a spy and he will make something that outlasts the programme. He was still doing voice work, on Lower Decks, in 2024. Start with Garak, and go to Dirty Harry afterwards to see what everyone else saw first.
Biography
Andrew Jordt Robinson is an American actor and director. Born in New York City on 14 February 1942, he trained at the University of New Hampshire, the New School for Social Research and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright Scholarship. He began his career on stage and in supporting film and television roles during the 1960s and 1970s.
Robinson is known for his portrayal of the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry (1971), Larry Cotton in Hellraiser (1987) and Elim Garak in the series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999). He directed the DS9 episode "Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places" (1996) and two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. He co-founded the Matrix Theatre Company in Los Angeles and later served as director of the Master of Fine Arts acting programme at the University of Southern California.
