Ben Gazzara, 1930–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

A chance meeting in 1968 led the actor Ben Gazzara to some of his most important film roles. On the last day of shooting for the television series Run for Your Life, Gazzara encountered actor and maverick filmmaker John Cassavetes on the Universal Studios lot. The two had a passing acquaintance from their early days in New York, and Cassavetes suggested they do a film together. Over the next decade, the two made three celebrated films—Husbands, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night—that have become favorites of filmmakers and actors alike. The films helped cement Gazzara’s reputation as an intense, visceral performer both on the stage and the screen.

Gazzara caught the acting bug early, said The New York Times. Growing up as the son of Sicilian immigrants in New York City, Gazzara saw a friend in a play when he was 11 and longed to join him. “Once I heard the applause I was sold,” he later said. As a young man, he trained at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and launched a Broadway career, originating the role of Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.

Gazzara made his film debut in 1957 in The Strange One, reprising his role in a Broadway play about brutality at a Southern military school, said the Los Angeles Times. He followed that with Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder and a run of television series and films over the next two decades. “Nobody ever knew what to do with me because I wasn’t easily pigeonholed,” Gazzara once said. He spent much of the 1980s living and acting in Italy, explaining, “I fell in love with the lifestyle.” A career renaissance in the U.S. in the late 1990s saw him starring in such films as David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, said The Washington Post. “He never makes anything obvious,” Mamet said in 1998, “and that’s the best thing you can say about an actor.”