Ben Gazzara

Ben Gazzara: The Actor Who Chose the Elbow Room

At twenty-five, Ben Gazzara created Brick in the first Broadway production of *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* — an alcoholic, sexually cornered man in a Tennessee Williams play that changed what American theatre could say out loud. Half a lifetime later he liked to point out that the performance most people had actually seen him give was the villain in *Road House*. He said it as a joke. It also happens to be the shape of his career: a Method-trained stage actor of the first rank who spent fifty years taking the work that let him do what he wanted, and cheerfully took some that didn't.

Kips Bay

Biagio Anthony Gazzara was born in New York City on 28 August 1930 to Sicilian immigrant parents, and grew up on East 29th Street in Kips Bay. He found acting through drama programmes at the Boys & Girls Club. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Saint Simon Stock in the Bronx, then spent two years studying electrical engineering at City College before abandoning it.

What he abandoned it for was the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, run by the German director Erwin Piscator, and then the Actors Studio, of which he remained a member for the rest of his life. That training is the key to everything he later did on camera.

Brick

His breakthrough was as Jocko de Paris in *End as a Man*, which moved from off-Broadway to Broadway in 1953–54. Then came Brick, opposite Barbara Bel Geddes, in 1955–56, and immediately afterwards a long run in *A Hatful of Rain*, playing a drug addict — two of the most difficult male roles the American stage had then produced, back to back, before he turned twenty-seven.

He returned to Broadway repeatedly over the decades: the Actors Studio *Strange Interlude* in 1963, *Hughie* and *Duet* in 1975, a revival of *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* as George in 1976, and finally *Awake and Sing!* in 2006. He was nominated for the Tony three times — in 1956, 1975 and 1977 — and never won one.

Anatomy of a Murder, and a Man on the Run

Otto Preminger cast him as the soldier on trial in *Anatomy of a Murder* (1959), and that launched the film career after an earlier appearance in *The Strange One* (1957) alongside fellow Actors Studio graduates. He made a comedy in Italy, *The Passionate Thief*, with Anna Magnani and Totò in 1960 — an early sign of an affinity that would eventually make Italy his home.

Television made him properly famous. After *Arrest and Trial* in 1963–64 he starred in *Run for Your Life* from 1965 to 1968, playing a man given a terminal diagnosis and determined to use what was left. It drew him two Emmy nominations and three Golden Globe nominations. He also directed, twice, for *Columbo*.

Cassavetes

The most important professional relationship of his life was with John Cassavetes, and it produced the work he is now most admired for. In *Husbands* (1970) he starred alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. In *The Killing of a Chinese Bookie* (1976) he was Cosmo Vitelli, the strip-club owner sent out to kill a man. In *Opening Night* (1977) he played Manny Victor, the stage director wrangling Gena Rowlands's disintegrating actress.

These are not likeable men and Gazzara never asked audiences to find them likeable. They are self-deluding, evasive, sentimental about themselves, and he played all of that without commentary.

The Late Renaissance

Peter Bogdanovich gave him the title role in *Saint Jack* (1979) and then *They All Laughed* (1981), which co-starred Audrey Hepburn — with whom, he later disclosed, he had a romance. He played Al Capone in *Capone* (1975), appeared in *Voyage of the Damned*, *Bloodline* and *Inchon* opposite Laurence Olivier, and took the *Road House* villain in 1989.

Then a genuinely startling final act. Across the 1990s he made thirty-eight films, working for the directors who had grown up on Cassavetes: David Mamet in *The Spanish Prisoner* (1997), the Coen brothers as the pornographer Jackie Treehorn in *The Big Lebowski* (1998), Todd Solondz in *Happiness* (1998), Vincent Gallo in *Buffalo '66* (1998), Spike Lee in *Summer of Sam* (1999), John McTiernan in *The Thomas Crown Affair* (1999), and Lars von Trier in *Dogville* (2003). His only Emmy arrived for the HBO film *Hysterical Blindness*; he had earlier been nominated for *An Early Frost* (1985), one of the first American dramas to confront AIDS.

Why Ben Is Called a Genius

Gazzara's claim is craft, and an intellectual craft rather than a physical one, which distinguishes him from most people handed the word. His specialism was "gritty, naturalistic portrayals of intense, often amoral characters" — and the difficult part is the amorality. Anyone can play a bad man as a bad man. Gazzara played Brick, the *Hatful of Rain* addict, Cosmo Vitelli and Jackie Treehorn from inside their own self-justifications, so that the audience is never handed a verdict. That means suppressing the actor's instinct to be liked, across three hours of stage time or a Cassavetes improvisation, and few performers manage it.

The second element is strategic. The *Hollywood Reporter* put it exactly: he "positioned himself for 'creative elbow room,' seeking edgy characters in non-mainstream productions or infusing mainstream productions with idiosyncratic supporting turns." That is a coherent fifty-year plan, and it is why a man who never became a movie star has a filmography most movie stars would envy.

The counter-case is real, and he made part of it himself. Three Tony nominations and no Tony; one Emmy across six decades. He turned down film roles in the mid-1950s out of stage snobbery and later called those refusals foolish, then over-corrected into accepting nearly everything — thirty-eight films in one decade includes chaff, and *Inchon* and *Road House* are not *Opening Night*. He was a great actor with an uneven filmography, which is not the same thing as a genius, and the sources call him neither.

Legacy

He married three times: Louise Erickson from 1951 to 1957; the actress Janice Rule from 1961 to 1979, with whom he had a daughter; and the model Elke Krivat from 1982 until his death, whose daughter he adopted. He had earlier been engaged to Elaine Stritch. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day before switching to cigars in the mid-1960s, and was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1999.

He lived mostly in Italy from the late 1970s, with a second house in Umbria, and served on the executive committee of Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East. There is one story that belongs on any honest accounting of the man: while filming *The Bridge at Remagen* in Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Soviet tanks arrived, Gazzara and Robert Vaughn got a Czech waitress they had befriended across the border into Austria.

He published a memoir, *In the Moment: My Life as an Actor*, in 2004, suffered a stroke the following year, and died of pancreatic cancer at Bellevue Hospital on 3 February 2012, aged eighty-one.