Raised on Manhattan's upper west side (his father was a dentist with a thriving practice in Harlem), Evans began his show-business career as a teenage radio act or. After flopping in his first attempt at movie acting, he took a job promoting sales of ladies' slacks for Evan-Picone, the clothing company founded and run by his brother. Some years later, Norma Shearer spotted him hanging around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel; she successfully touted him for the role of Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces. In a New York nightclub, Evans also caught the eye of Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast him as a bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises. By the end of the fifties, Evans writes, "I was sure of one thing: I was a half-assed actor." He determined to recast himself as a producer. Before launching his first picture, though, he was hired by Charles Bluhdorn, head of the Gulf + Western conglomerate, as part of a shakeup of Paramount Pictures.

Within months Evans was head of production. In the late sixties and early seventies he became the quintessential "new Hollywood" executive: slickly packaged productions like Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and The Godfather revived Paramount. (The latter film and Chinatown are the artistic highlights of Evans' Param ount career, though the amount of credit he deserves for them has been debated for decades.) Eased out of Paramount, he saw The Cotton Club turn from a musical "Godfather" into a fiasco of front-page proportions. Evans righted his career with a new Paramount deal in the nineties.


Had one sister, Alice. His older brother Charles started a women's clothing line, which was the source of much of Robert's money. Brother of producer Charles Evans His 1998 marriage to Catherine Oxenberg lasted only ten days. One child, with Ali MacGraw, actor/director Josh Evans. Celebrity attorney Robert Shapiro celebrated his 50th birthday at the estate. Attended Henry Kissinger's 50th birtday party at New York's Harmony Club in 1973 Attended Super Bowl (I) with friend Clint Eastwood in 1967 Declined offers to produce then future blockbusters Airport (1970), The French Connection (1971), and Jaws (1975). According to his book he was contacted by Sharon Tate and asked to be her houseguest on the evening she was killed, but he had to decline. She then invited Jay Sebring. Is very close friends with next-door neighbor and former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash. His seventh wife, Lady Victoria White, filed for divorce on June 16, 2006 citing irreconcilable differences (June 21, 2006). He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Motion Pictures at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.