Some of his choices for worst dressed seemed meant to shock -- notably, in 1973, Jacqueline Onassis, whose name regularly appeared on best dressed lists.
Blackwell's goal was not to be insightful so much as controversial, Sheppard, the former Women's Wear Daily fashion editor, said. As a result, she said, hardly anyone took his list seriously.
His personal style would make anyone wonder where he might rank on a best dressed list. In his early years he wore tight pants and silk shirts unbuttoned halfway down his chest. In middle-age he often wore a turtleneck sweater topped by a heavy gold chain. He spiced a dark conservative suit with bright red socks and wore a huge diamond earring.
In a 2000 interview with the Ottawa Citizen of Canada, he said he had had four face-lifts, starting with an ear-tuck and nose job at 17.
Born Richard Sylvan Selzer on Aug. 29, 1922, in Bensonhurst, a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., Blackwell was the younger of two sons of impoverished parents who were evicted from their apartment several times. More than once, Blackwell and his brother, Benson, lived in homes for troubled boys. Their father abandoned the family when Blackwell was a young teenager.
He got his start as an actor with small roles in several Broadway shows and was in the cast of "Dead End," which starred the Dead End Kids.
When the show closed in 1937, Blackwell moved to Los Angeles with his mother and brother and found work in movies, starting with "Little Tough Guy" (1938), a spinoff of the Broadway show he left behind. He got another small role that year in "Juvenile Court," starring Rita Hayworth.
In his 20s, he landed a small part in a Broadway show, "Catherine Was Great," starring Mae West, in 1944.
He also worked as a model for "True Detective" magazine, posing as "a mad scientist, a crazed rapist, a killer priest and a blind fortune teller," he wrote in his autobiography, to illustrate crime stories.
He credited aviation entrepreneur and movie producer Howard Hughes with changing his name to Richard Blackwell. Hughes cast him in "Vendetta" and chose the new name to sound "theatrical, polished, memorable," Blackwell wrote in his autobiography. But his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
