“I never realized it was going to last 10 years,” he told The Herald-News of New Jersey in 1994. It went on to last longer than that.

“He was unequivocally the face of AMC,” Joshua Sapan, the president and chief executive of AMC Networks, said in a phone interview. “He was a portal through which we all followed.”

Robert Paul Vierengel (he changed his name professionally in the 1950s) was born on April 19, 1934, in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn at a time when movie fans flocked to ornate cinema palaces. He went as frequently as he could, starting at age 7 or 8, often staying all day for as little as a dime.

“When I was 9, I went for my first suit,” he recalled in an interview in 1995 with The Baltimore Sun. “I wanted a black suit and my father said, ‘Why do you want a black suit?’ I said, ‘It looks like a tuxedo, I’ll look like Fred Astaire.’ ”

As a teenager he worked as a theater usher. That allowed him to see “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950), starring José Ferrer, 86 times by his count.

It took him decades to find his way to AMC: He was a magician, a bass player, a disc jockey on radio stations in the New York City area and an actor who did commercial voice-overs.