Biagio Anthony Gazzarra , known as
Ben Gazzara, was an American film, stage, and
Emmy Award winning television actor and director died from pancreatic cancer he was 81.
(August 28, 1930 – February 3, 2012)
Early life
Gazzara was born in New York City, the son of
Italian immigrants Angelina (
née Cusumano) and Antonio Gazzarra, a laborer and carpenter. Both Gazzara's parents were of Sicilian origin, Angelina from
Castrofilippo and Antonio from
Canicattì, both in the
province of Agrigento.
[1] Gazzara grew up in New York's
Kips Bay neighborhood; he lived on East 29th Street and participated in the drama program at Madison Square
Boys and Girls Club located across the street.
[2] He attended New York City's
Stuyvesant High School, but finally graduated from Saint Simon Stock in the
Bronx.
[3] Years later, he said that the discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime during his teen years.
[4] He went to
City College of New York to study
electrical engineering. After two years, he relented. He took classes in acting at the
Dramatic Workshop of
The New School in New York with the influential German director
Erwin Piscator and afterward joined the
Actors Studio.
Career
In 1954, Gazzara (having tweaked his original surname from "Gazzarra") made several appearances on
NBC's
legal drama Justice, based on case studies from the
Legal Aid Society of New York. Gazzara starred in various
Broadway productions around this time, including creating the role of Brick in
Tennessee Williams'
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1955) opposite
Barbara BelGeddes, directed by
Elia Kazan, although he lost out to
Paul Newman when the film version was cast. He joined other Actors Studio members in the 1957 film
The Strange One. Then came a high-profile performance as a soldier on trial for avenging his wife's rape in
Otto Preminger's courtroom drama
Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Gazzara became well known in several television series, beginning with
Arrest and Trial, which ran from 1963 to 1964 on ABC, and the more-successful series
Run for Your Life
from 1965-68 on NBC, in which he played a terminally ill man trying to
get the most out of the last two years of his life. For his work in the
series, Gazzara received two
Emmy nominations for "Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series" and three
Golden Globe nominations for "Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama."
[5][6] Contemporary screen credits included
The Young Doctors (1961),
A Rage to Live (1965) and
The Bridge at Remagen (1969).
Gazzara told
Charlie Rose
in 1998 that he went from being mainly a stage actor who often would
turn up his nose at film roles in the mid-1950s to, much later, a
ubiquitous character actor who turned very little down. "When I became
hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers," he said. "I
won't tell you the pictures I turned down because you'll say, 'You are a
fool,' and I was a fool."
Some of the actor's most formidable characters were those he created with his friend
John Cassavetes in the 1970s. They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes's film
Husbands (1970), in which he appeared alongside
Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. In
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
(1976), Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip-joint owner,
Cosmo Vitelli. A year later, he starred in yet another
Cassavetes-directed movie,
Opening Night, as stage director Manny Victor, who struggles with the mentally unstable star of his show, played by Cassavetes's wife
Gena Rowlands. Also during this period he appeared in the television miniseries
QB VII (1974), and the films
Capone (1975),
Voyage of the Damned (1976),
High Velocity (1976), and
Saint Jack (1979).
Gazzara at premiere of
Looking for Palladin, New York City, October 30, 2009
In the 1980s, Gazzara appeared in several movies such as
Inchon co-starring
Laurence Olivier and
Richard Roundtree,
They All Laughed (directed by
Peter Bogdanovich), and in a villainous role in the oft-televised
Patrick Swayze film
Road House,
which the actor jokingly said is probably his most-watched performance.
He starred with Rowlands in the critically acclaimed AIDS-themed TV
movie
An Early Frost (1985), for which he received his third
Emmy nomination.
Gazzara appeared in 38 films, many for television, in the 1990s. He worked with a number of renowned directors, such as the
Coen brothers (
The Big Lebowski),
Spike Lee (
Summer of Sam),
David Mamet (
The Spanish Prisoner),
Walter Hugo Khouri (
Forever),
Todd Solondz (
Happiness),
John Turturro (
Illuminata), and
John McTiernan (
The Thomas Crown Affair).
In his seventies, Gazzara continued to be active. In 2003, he was in the ensemble cast of the experimental film
Dogville, directed by
Lars von Trier of Denmark and starring
Nicole Kidman, as well as the television film
Hysterical Blindness (he received his first
Emmy Award for his role). Several other projects have recently been completed or are currently in production. In 2005, he played
Agostino Casaroli in the television miniseries,
Pope John Paul II. He completed filming his scenes in the film
The Wait in early 2012, shortly before his death.
[7]
In addition to acting, Gazzara worked as an occasional television director; his credits include the
Columbo episodes
A Friend in Deed (1974) and
Troubled Waters (1975). Gazzara was nominated three times for the
Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play—in 1956 for
A Hatful of Rain, in 1975 for the paired short plays
Hughie and
Duet, and in 1977 for a revival of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite
Colleen Dewhurst.
Personal life
Gazzara married three times; to
Louise Erickson (1951–57),
Janice Rule (1961–1979), and German model Elke Krivat from 1982. He also disclosed a love affair with actress
Audrey Hepburn.
[8] They co-starred in two of her final films,
Bloodline (1979) and
They All Laughed (1981).
During filming of the war movie
The Bridge at Remagen (1969) co-starring Gazzara and his friend
Robert Vaughn, the
Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia. Filming was halted temporarily, and the cast and crew were detained before filming was completed in
West Germany.
[9][10][11]
During their departure from Czechoslovakia, Gazzara and Vaughn assisted
with the escape of a Czech waitress whom they had befriended. They
smuggled her to
Austria in a car waved through a border crossing that had not yet been taken over by the Soviet army in its crackdown on the
Prague Spring.
[12]
Other
Gazzara was the honorary starter of the
1979 Daytona 500, the first flag-to-flag Daytona 500 broadcast live on
CBS. He was also featured in a 1994 article in
Cigar Aficionado, in which he admitted smoking four packs of cigarettes a day until taking up cigar smoking in the mid-1960s.
[3]
Death
Gazzara was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1999. On February 3, 2012, he died of pancreatic cancer at
Bellevue Hospital Center in New York.
[13]
Selected filmography
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