Bob Elkins

In a career spanning four decades, actor Bob Elkins has played a range of diverse characters too numerous to remember, but too compelling to forget. Despite impossible deadlines, sleep-depriving rehearsal schedules and grueling projects that required him to endure hours in rain, snow and scorching heat, his toughest role may have been the one into which he was born and from which he eventually fled, hiding in the spotlight, seeking the approval of strangers. Bob Elkins spent his first five years of life in the tiny mountain town of Mt. Hope, West Virginia, the son of a struggling coal miner, and the only brother of two sisters. One of his earliest memories is that of a real-life drama: a nearby creek overflowing its banks, muddy floodwaters inundating the first floor of his two-story house. Oblivious to the danger at hand, young Bob rode his tricycle through the rapidly rising water in the downstairs hallway, his mother desperately yelling for him to come upstairs. He made it just in