Ben Gazzara
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| Ben Gazzara | ||||||
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| Image:Bengazarra.jpg Ben Gazarra photographed by Carl van Vechten, 1955 | ||||||
| Birth name | Biagio Anthony Gazzara | |||||
| Born | August 28 1930 New York City, New York, U.S. | |||||
| Spouse(s) | Louise Erickson (1951-1957) Janice Rule (1961-1979) Elke Krivat (1982-) | |||||
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Ben Gazzara (born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on August 28, 1930, in New York City) is a North American actor in television and motion pictures.
Born to Italian immigrants, Antonio Gazzara and Angela Consumano, Gazzara grew up on New York's tough Lower East Side. He attended New York City's famed Stuyvesant High School.[1] He found relief from his bleak surroundings by joining a theater company at a very young age. Years later, he said that the discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime during his teen years. Despite his obvious talent, he went to City College of New York to study electrical engineering. After two years, he relented, and after a short intermission joined the Actor's Studio.
In the 1950s, he starred in various Broadway productions, most notably Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan. However, he lost out on the film role to Paul Newman. As a young actor, Gazzara joined other Actors Studio members in the 1957 film, The Strange One.
He has had a long and varied acting career, with spells as an accomplished director too (TV mostly). His most popular acting roles include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Young Doctors (1961), A Rage to Live (1965), The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Capone (1975), Voyage of the Damned (1976), and High Velocity (1977). He also starred in a couple of television series, beginning with Arrest and Trial, which ran from 1963 until 1964 on ABC, and the more successful series Run for Your Life from 1965 to 1968 on NBC. He 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" & "Duet"; and in 1977, for a revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opposite Colleen Dewhurst.
His most formidable appearances, however, were characters he created for his friend John Cassavetes in the 1970s. They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes' film Husbands (1970) where he appeared alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. The collaboration of the two men achieved its peak in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip joint owner, Cosmo Vitelli. A year later Gazzara starred in yet another Cassavetes-directed movie, Opening Night, playing the role of stage director Manny Victor who struggles with the mentally unstable star of his show, played by Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands.
In the 1980s, he could be seen in a variety of different movies, such as Saint Jack and They All Laughed (directed by Peter Bogdanovich), and the cult classic Road House. He also appeared in the critically acclaimed A.I.D.S.-themed T.V. movie An Early Frost (1985), which also starred Gena Rowlands.
In the 1990's, he appeared in thirty-eight films, among these many T.V. productions. In Hollywood movies he mostly appeared as a supporting actor, but worked with several renowned directors, such as the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski), Spike Lee (Summer of Sam), Walter Hugo Khouri (Forever), Todd Solondz Happiness, and John McTiernan (The Thomas Crown Affair).
Now in his seventies, Gazzara is still acting. In 2003, he appeared in the film Dogville, directed by Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier, along with Nicole Kidman.
[edit] References
- ^ Rothstein, Mervyn. "Running Cool - Ben Gazzara's Long Stage and Screen Career has Included a Love Affair with a Good Smoke". Cigar Aficionado. Retrieved on 2007-11-01.
[edit] External links
| Awards | ||
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| Preceded by Michael Moriarty for James Dean | Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor - Miniseries or a Movie 2003 for Hysterical Blindness | Succeeded by Jeffrey Wright for Angels in America |
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