Please Rewind Talent Wall

Ben Gazzara

Ben Gazzara brought a stage actor’s concentration and a character actor’s appetite for complication to a career that moved freely between theatre, film and television. Born in Manhattan in 1930 to Sicilian immigrant parents, he grew up in Kips Bay and discovered acting through the drama program at the Madison Square Boys & Girls Club. He initially studied electrical engineering at City College of New York, but left the subject behind for acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop and later joined the Actors Studio. His early reputation was made onstage. After receiving acclaim for End as a Man, Gazzara became a Broadway sensation as Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan. He turned down the film version, but soon established himself on screen with The Strange One and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, playing a soldier on trial for avenging his wife’s rape. Television gave Gazzara another kind of prominence. He starred in Arrest and Trial and then Run for Your Life, playing a terminally ill man determined to make the most of his remaining time. The latter brought him two Emmy nominations and three Golden Globe nominations. Some of Gazzara’s most substantial film work came through his friendship and collaboration with John Cassavetes. In Husbands, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night, he played men whose confidence could barely contain their uncertainty. His Cosmo Vitelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—a strip-club owner caught in a tightening trap—remains a defining example of his ability to make bravado and vulnerability occupy the same frame. Gazzara continued taking varied roles across American and European productions, from Saint Jack and They All Laughed to Road House, The Big Lebowski, Buffalo ’66, Happiness and Dogville. He also returned repeatedly to the stage and directed television, including two episodes of Columbo. Still working into his seventies, Gazzara built a career less around a fixed screen persona than around difficult, restless characters who never seemed entirely at ease with themselves.