But while fans saw a handsome young actor whose career appeared to be taking off, Benson was carrying a frightening secret behind the scenes.
He had a serious heart condition.
And for years, he was terrified that revealing it could cost him everything he had worked for.
Long before Hollywood made him a teen idol, Benson was already growing up around entertainment.
Born in Dallas, Texas, he moved with his family to New York City when he was five years old. His father had worked in the cotton business in Texas but was also a comedy writer, and New York offered greater opportunities to pursue that creative side.
It wasn’t long before young Robby followed him into show business.
Benson began appearing in commercials and became involved with stage and television work while still a child. By the time he was 10, acting had become an increasingly serious part of his life, and he adopted his mother’s maiden name, Benson, professionally.
One of the experiences that helped ignite his passion was seeing a production of the musical Oliver!
The effect was enormous.
Benson found an agent, and before long, he was touring Japan in a production of the same musical.
It became increasingly obvious that this was not simply a childhood hobby.
Benson had the looks producers noticed immediately, but he also possessed the talent and determination needed to build a lasting career.
His early work included an appearance on the long-running daytime soap Search for Tomorrow, and as the 1970s progressed, bigger opportunities arrived.
Soon, his face was everywhere.
Movies such as Ode to Billy Joe, One on One and Ice Castles turned him into a favorite among young audiences.
Benson’s appeal was different from the tougher Hollywood leading men of the era.
There was a vulnerability about him.
He could play romantic, emotional and sensitive characters without losing the charisma that had made him a teen idol.
Not every critic was impressed.
One famously unflattering description called him “cute as Bambi and twice as smarmy.”
Audiences didn’t seem to care.
Benson had connected with an entire generation.
And looking back years later, he remembered that period with affection rather than bitterness.
“It was a wonderful time,” he told The Item in 1993.
“I had a blast, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I loved it.”
He also recognized how different the entertainment industry had become for young performers.
“Show business has changed a lot, especially for young actors,” he said. “But back then, I would have paid THEM to be in the movies.”
Yet behind that excitement was something Benson was desperately trying to keep hidden.
His heart.
Benson had been diagnosed with a heart murmur when he was young, but more alarming symptoms began appearing as he entered adulthood.
He experienced dizziness.
At one point, he even lost consciousness.
“I remember passing out and was thinking, ‘Wow, this is serious. But I better not tell anyone,’” he later recalled.
That reaction might seem surprising today.
But Benson was building his career in an industry where actors could fear that being perceived as medically fragile would make producers reluctant to hire them.
So he hid what was happening.
When symptoms affected him professionally, he sometimes attributed them to less serious problems such as indigestion or exhaustion.
He wanted to keep working.
He wanted to make the transition from teenage heartthrob to respected adult actor.
And he feared that if Hollywood discovered the truth about his heart, he might never be given that opportunity.
While filming The Chosen, however, Benson confided in his co-star Rod Steiger.
According to Benson, Steiger gave him advice that demonstrated exactly how unforgiving the industry could feel.
“He said that if anything were to happen to my heart, to never let anyone know,” Benson recalled.
“It’s career suicide.”
Benson took the warning seriously.
But eventually, his body made keeping the secret impossible.
While working on Die Laughing, his condition became increasingly difficult to ignore.
After nearly collapsing during filming, Benson finally had to confront the problem he had spent years trying to hide.
In 1984, he underwent open-heart surgery.
Doctors repaired a defective valve, and the operation was reported to have gone extremely well.
Benson eventually left the hospital and attempted to move forward with his life.
But his heart problems were not finished with him.
During that first operation, Benson received a bovine valve replacement.
Such valves do not necessarily last for a lifetime, and approximately 15 years later, he needed another operation.
He underwent a second major heart procedure around 2000.
Even then, complications continued.
Benson later experienced difficulty breathing and ultimately endured multiple open-heart surgeries over the course of his life.
In total, he has spoken about undergoing four open-heart operations.
The experience transformed much more than his career.
Repeatedly facing major surgery forced Benson to confront his own mortality while trying to remain a husband, father, actor and teacher.
And through those frightening years, one person remained at the center of his life.
His wife, Karla DeVito.
Benson met DeVito, a singer and actress, while they were working together on The Pirates of Penzance.
Their connection developed into something lasting, and the couple married in 1982.
As Benson’s medical problems became increasingly serious, he has credited DeVito with helping him navigate the complicated world of doctors, treatments and medications.
“She helped me find doctors, she made sure I was getting the best treatment, the right medicine,” Benson told USA Today.
Then he made his feelings even clearer.
“I’m alive because of her.”
Together, Benson and DeVito built the family life that ultimately became more important to him than Hollywood fame.
They welcomed daughter Lyric in 1983 and son Zephyr in 1992.
In 2022, while celebrating 40 years of marriage, Benson shared a characteristically playful tribute to his wife.
“We’ve been married 40 years! I am the luckiest man on the planet Earth,” he wrote, jokingly extending the declaration “in all universes and galaxies in perpetuity.”
But while Benson’s face became less common in major live-action movies as the years passed, his career never truly disappeared.
In fact, one of his most enduring roles required audiences not to see his face at all.
In 1991, Benson provided the voice of the Beast in Disney’s animated classic Beauty and the Beast.
For people who remembered the slender, soft-spoken teen idol of the 1970s, hearing Benson produce the Beast’s enormous, intimidating voice could be startling.
But Benson approached the character as a serious acting role rather than simply a cartoon performance.
“They gave me an incredible amount of freedom,” he later told MovieWeb.
“I didn’t want Beast to be a cartoon character. I played it as though I were doing a Broadway show. As if this was a living person.”
The performance became iconic.
Benson had actually been working with his voice since his teenage years, but Beauty and the Beast introduced that talent to an enormous international audience.
And the casting was not necessarily obvious.
Co-director Kirk Wise later recalled that numerous performers had been considered for the Beast.
“We read Tim Curry, Gary Busey, a variety of people. We even considered David Bowie,” Wise said.
But Benson brought something the filmmakers felt was missing.
“We couldn’t find anybody to bring balance to the character,” Wise explained. “Robby was the first to give the character that balance, as well as a sense of humor.”
There was something almost poetic about the role.
As a young actor, Benson had sometimes felt trapped by his appearance.
Being handsome had opened doors, but it could also make it difficult for people to look beyond the teen-idol image and appreciate his range as an actor.
The Beast changed that.
His face was nowhere on screen.
Only his performance remained.
And that performance became one of the most recognizable characters in Disney animation.
Benson continued returning to the role for various projects connected with the character, something he has described with both gratitude and humor.
“I’m always honored,” he said. “They always come to me. They are very loyal.”
He then joked that eventually Disney might find someone who sounded like him and could do the job for less money.
“Until that happens, I want to be the guy,” he said.
Away from acting, Benson discovered another calling.
Teaching.
He spent years sharing his experience with younger filmmakers and performers, including academic work at institutions such as the University of South Carolina and UCLA.
He later became a professor of film production before retiring from full-time university teaching.
It was another side of a man audiences had once known primarily from romantic dramas.
Benson had evolved from child performer to teen idol, screenwriter, director, voice actor, professor, husband, father and eventually grandfather.
And he never entirely abandoned acting.
In 2019, he appeared in Apple Seed and also returned to television in the Hallmark production A Feeling of Home.
The latter role particularly resonated with him because he played a father navigating his relationship with an adult daughter.
For Benson, the emotions were familiar.
“As a parent, you always want to make sure there’s an open and honest relationship with your children,” he explained.
Even after children become adults, he said, the worrying never completely disappears.
“Even if they’re in their 20s or 30s, you wake up in the middle of the night still worried and hoping everything’s OK.”
Then Benson summed up what decades of fame, illness and personal change had taught him.
“The most important thing to me on the planet is my love for my wife and my family.”
For those who first discovered Robby Benson as the blue-eyed young star of the 1970s, seeing him decades later can bring an immediate wave of nostalgia.
The dark hair has changed with age.
The teenage face has matured.
But those unmistakable blue eyes remain.
More importantly, the story behind that familiar face turned out to be far more complicated than audiences knew.
At the height of his early fame, Benson feared that admitting he had a heart problem could destroy his career.
Instead, he survived multiple major surgeries, built a marriage that has lasted for decades, raised a family, taught future generations of filmmakers and created an animated performance that became more enduring than almost any photograph from his teen-idol years.
The young heartthrob millions once watched on movie screens had spent years quietly fighting for his own heart.
And after everything that heart has been through, Benson has made it clear what matters most to him now.
Not being a Hollywood heartthrob.
Not being famous.
Not even being remembered as the Beast.
His wife and family.
For a man who once worried that revealing the truth about his heart might cost him everything, that may be the most fitting ending of all.