- After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 18-year-old Cliff - then serving on a merchant ship in the Pacific Ocean - was reported dead to his family in California.
- Was responsible for unraveling a major studio fraud in the 1970s, which led to the downfall of powerful Columbia Pictures president David Begelman. The morality of Hollywood was such that it did more short-term harm to Robertson's career than to Begelman's, who soon after was hired to run MGM. The full story is told in David McClintick's 1982 bestseller, "Indecent Exposure".
- Passed up the chance to play the lead role in Dirty Harry (1971), which went to Clint Eastwood.
- Personally chosen by John F. Kennedy to portray a World War II US Navy Lieutenant Kennedy in PT 109 (1963).
- He owned a number of vintage aircraft, including an original German Messerschmitt ME-108, which was on display at the Parker-O'Malley Air Museum (closed in 2009) in Ghent, New York.
- Tried to raise money to make a sequel to Charly (1968) and even shot a 15-minute portion of it.
- In 1972, he said that "Nobody made more mediocre films than I did", including Too Late the Hero (1970), which he described as "a bunch of junk".
- Inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006 in the Advocate category.
- The reason that Cliff Robertson was not at the Oscars to receive his Best Actor award was because he was in the middle of filming the movie, Too Late the Hero (1970) in the Philippines. The director Robert Aldrich would not allow him to leave owing to budget constraints.
- Along with Leonard Nimoy, David McCallum, Barbara Rush and Peter Breck, he is one of only five actors to appear in both The Outer Limits (1963) and The Outer Limits (1995). He played Alan Maxwell in The Galaxy Being (1963) and Theodore Harris in Joyride (1999).
- Alfred Hitchcock considered him for the role of Sam Loomis in Psycho (1960), but the role went to John Gavin. Robert Wise considered him for the lead role in The Sand Pebbles (1966), but that role went to Steve McQueen.
- His parents are Clifford Parker Robertson Jr. and the former Audrey Olga Willingham. His father was described as "the idle heir to a tidy sum of ranching money". They have divorced when he was a year old, and his mother died of peritonitis a year later in El Paso, Texas. Robertson was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Eleanor "Eleanora" Willingham; an aunt and an uncle.
- He had a daughter, Stephanie Robertson, with his first wife, Cynthia Stone. He also had a daughter, Heather Robertson, with his second wife, Dina Merrill.
- Both he and his then wife Dina Merrill played "Special Guest Villains" in Batman (1966).
- After serving as a merchant marine, he studied at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He left the college without getting his degree. He moved to New York City where he studied at the Actors Studio.
- Was a well-known sailplane pilot, and was also the voice in the "Running On Empty" documentary video about the Barron Hilton Cup, a prestigious soaring competition.
- He has two roles in common with Martin Sheen: (1) Robertson played John F. Kennedy in PT 109 (1963) while Sheen played him in Kennedy (1983) and (2) Robertson played Ben Parker in Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007) while Sheen played him in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014).
- Following his death, he was interred at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton, New York.
- Was a member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1989.
- Special guest at Roger Ebert's 4th annual Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois. (March 2002)
- He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on December 17, 1986.
- He appeared in two different comic book company adaptations: Shame in Batman (1966) a DC comics adaption, and Uncle Ben in the Spider-man trilogy, a Marvel comics adaption.
- Ex-son-in-law of Marjorie Merriweather Post and E.F. Hutton.
- Robertson was the director and an actor in the film "Morning, Winter and Night" which began filming in Massachusetts in 1978 but shut down after one week when the production ran out of money. A featured actor was Brooke Shields.
- He personally campaigned for Congressman Mo Udall in the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential primary in 1976.
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