Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan (born September 7, 1909, Constantinople, Ottoman Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]—died September 28, 2003, New York, New York, U.S.) was a Turkish-born American film director and author noted for his successes on the stage—especially with plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller—as well as for his critically acclaimed films and for his role in developing a revolutionary style of acting that embodied psychological and behavioral truth. His reputation as one of the most accomplished and influential American stage and film directors of the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s was clouded by his cooperation in 1952 with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), to which he “named names,” identifying fellow artists as members of the Communist Party.

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Early work

The child of ethnic Greeks who lived in Turkey, Kazan immigrated to New York City at age four with his parents (who shortened their surname from Kazanjoglous). His father operated a rug business and eventually moved the family to suburban New Rochelle. Kazan was educated at Williams College, where he felt like an outsider among his privileged, predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant classmates. He then pursued an M.F.A. in drama at Yale University and married one of his classmates, playwright Molly Day Thatcher. In the early 1930s Kazan joined the Group Theatre in New York City, earning a reputation as a versatile performer and appearing in Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy (both by Clifford Odets). In 1935, having embraced the Marxism that would remain a lifelong influence on him, Kazan joined the Communist Party. Roughly a year and a half later he left the party after refusing to take part in a strike at the Group. After the Group disbanded in 1941, Kazan established himself as a stage director with his assured stewardship of Thorton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), as well as Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, and S.J. Perelman’s One Touch of Venus (1943).

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Films of the 1940s

By the mid-1930s Kazan had branched out into directing documentary films, including The People of the Cumberland (1937), about coal miners in Tennessee. As an actor he distinguished himself in gangster roles in two films directed by Anatole Litvak, City for Conquest (1940) and Blues in the Night (1941). In 1945 the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation hired Kazan to direct his first commercial feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from the best-selling novel by Betty Smith. It was a high-profile project with which to debut, but Kazan acquitted himself impressively, eliciting an especially strong performance from James Dunn, who earned an Academy Award as best supporting actor.

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In his early days in Hollywood, Kazan shadowed director John Ford, whose films were a huge influence on Kazan’s work, as were those of Soviet filmmakers Sergey Eisenstein and Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Kazan followed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with The Sea of Grass (1947), which featured Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and Boomerang! (1947), a taut film noir thriller with a cast that included Lee J. Cobb, Arthur Kennedy, and Dana Andrews. Kazan’s next effort, the Darryl F. Zanuck-produced Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), won him an Academy Award for best director and also took the award for best picture. An adaptation of Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel of the same name, the film was considered a scathing assault on anti-Semitism by contemporary audiences, though 21st-century viewers might find it less shocking. Gregory Peck plays a journalist who poses as a Jewish man to experience and expose discrimination. Pinky (1949) was yet another Zanuck-produced “social problem” film, this time about a light-skinned African American woman (Jeanne Crain) who returns to her Southern hometown after turning down a marriage proposal from a white man who was unaware of her racial heritage.

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Stage work in the 1940s

In 1947 Kazan and directors Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio in New York as a workshop dedicated to Method acting. The next year Lee Strasberg, with whom Kazan had worked at the Group Theatre, became the director of the studio, which began producing a bounty of skilled performers who had a huge impact on American stage and screen acting, many of them in plays and films directed by Kazan. Even as he was making his mark in Hollywood, Kazan continued to direct for the stage. Particularly noteworthy were his collaborations with playwrights Arthur Miller, who became one of his closest friends, and Tennessee Williams, a number of whose plays benefitted from Kazan’s guidance long before they went into production. In 1947 alone Kazan directed the premieres of Miller’s All My Sons, for which he received a Tony Award as best director, and Williams’s classic A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1949 he won another Tony Award as the director of the landmark production of Miller’s Death of a Salesman.