Obituary: Ben Gazzara / Brought intensity to stage, screen
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Ben Gazzara as Sgt. Angelo in "The Bridge at Remagen" (1969).
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Ben Gazzara, an intense actor whose long career included playing Brick in the original "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Broadway, roles in influential films by John Cassavetes and work with several generations of top Hollywood directors, died Friday in New York City. He was 81.
He died of pancreatic cancer at Bellevue Hospital Center, his lawyer, Jay Julien, said.
Mr. Gazzara studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where the careers of stars such as Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a visceral presence. It earned him regular work across half a century, not only onstage -- his last Broadway appearance was in the revival of "Awake and Sing!" in 2006 -- but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s series "Run for Your Life."
If Mr. Gazzara never achieved Brando's stature, that was partly because of a certain laissez-faire approach to his career: an early suspicion of film, a reluctance to go after desirable roles.
"When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers," he said in a 1998 interview on "Charlie Rose." "I won't tell you the pictures I turned down because you would say, 'You are a fool.' And I was a fool."
And yet Mr. Gazzara's enduring reputation may well rest on his film work, specifically the movies he made with Cassavetes, the actor and director revered by cinephiles for his risk-taking independent projects and a directorial style that encouraged spontaneity.
The two had had bit parts in the 1969 comedy "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium," but it was in "Husbands" (1970), directed by Cassavetes, that they, along with Peter Falk, really made an impression as unhappily married men out for a drunken night on the town together. As Mr. Gazzara wrote in his autobiography, "In the Moment" (2004), the on-camera camaraderie was so convincing that people assumed the three men had been lifelong friends; in fact they had barely known one another when the filming began, although they became friends during it.
Mr. Gazzara's most important role for Cassavetes was in "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" (1976), in which he played a strip-club owner in debt to the mob. "It's a thoughtful, intelligent interpretation of a role that just may not have as much depth to it as he's ready to give it," Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Gazzara's performance.
First Published February 4, 2012 12:00 am
