Biagio Anthony "Ben" Gazzara (August 28, 1930 – February 3, 2012) was an American actor and director of film, stage, and television. He received numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award and a Drama Desk Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards and three Tony Awards.
Born to Italian immigrants in New York City, Gazzara studied at The New School and began his professional career with the Actors Studio, of which he was a lifelong member. His breakthrough role was in the Broadway play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955–56), which earned him widespread acclaim. A memorable performance as a soldier on trial for murder in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) transitioned Gazzara to an equally successful screen career. As the star of the television series Run for Your Life (1965–1968), he was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards and two Emmy Awards. He won his only Emmy Award for the television film Hysterical Blindness (2002).
Gazzara was known for his gritty, naturalistic portrayals of intense, often amoral characters.[2] According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Gazzara positioned himself for 'creative elbow room,' seeking edgy characters in non-mainstream productions or infusing mainstream productions with idiosyncratic supporting turns."[3]
Early life and education
Gazzara was born in New York City, the son of Sicilian immigrants Angelina (née Cusumano) and Antonio Gazzara, a laborer and carpenter; both parents were from the province of Agrigento—his mother from Castrofilippo and his father from Canicattì.[citation needed] He was raised in a monolingual, Sicilian-speaking household, and did not learn English until he went to school.[citation needed]
Gazzara grew up in New York's Kips Bay neighborhood; he lived on East 29th Street. He participated in the drama program at Madison Square Boys & Girls Club located across the street.[4] He attended New York City's Stuyvesant High School, but finally graduated from Saint Simon Stock in the Bronx.[5] Years later, he said that the discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime during his teen years.[6]
He received acclaim for his off-Broadway performance in End as a Man in 1953.[citation needed] The production was transferred to Broadway and ran until 1954.
His second film was 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 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."
He gained fame in the TV series Run for Your Life which ran from 1965 to 1968 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."[7][8]
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.
He starred in the television miniseries QB VII (1974), which won six primetime Emmy Awards. The six-and-a-half-hour series was based on a book by Leon Uris and co-starred Anthony Hopkins. He then played gangster Al Capone in the biographical film Capone (1975). Cassevetes was in the support cast.
Gazzara appeared on Broadway in Hughie (1975) then worked again for Cassavetes as director in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), in which Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip-joint owner, Cosmo Vitelli. He starred in an action movie, High Velocity (1976), and was one of many stars in Voyage of the Damned (1976).
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. He made an acclaimed TV movie The Death of Richie (1977).
In his seventies, Gazzara continued to be active. In 2003, he appeared in Nobody Don't Like Yogi, an off-Broadway show about Yogi Berra that had a solid run, and was in a revival of Awake and Sing! (2006).
Gazzara was married three times, first to actress Louise Erickson (1951–1957). He married actress Janice Rule on November 25, 1961 in San Francisco.[10] They had a daughter named Elizabeth.[11] They divorced in 1979. He married model Elke Krivat in 1982 and remained married to her until his death. Gazzara adopted his wife's daughter Danja from her prior relationship. Following his separation from his first wife, Gazzara was engaged to stage actress Elaine Stritch and later disclosed a love affair with actress Audrey Hepburn.[12] He and Hepburn co-starred in two of her final films, Bloodline (1979) and They All Laughed (1981).
In 1968, during filming of the war movie The Bridge at Remagen, co-starring Gazzara and friend Robert Vaughn, the Soviet Union and its allies invaded Czechoslovakia. The cast and crew were detained for a time; filming was later completed in West Germany.[13][14][15] 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.[16]
Gazzara was 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.[5]
