Elias Kazantzoglou (, ; September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003), known as Elia Kazan ( ),Dictionary.com – KazanOxford Learners' Dictionary – Elia Kazan was a Greek-American film and theatre director, producer, screenwriter and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".
Born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to Cappadocian Greek parents, his family went to the United States in 1913. After attending Williams College and then the Yale School of Drama, he acted professionally for eight years, later joining the Group Theatre in 1932, and co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947. With Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford, his actors' studio introduced "Method Acting" under the direction of Lee Strasberg. Kazan acted in a few films, including City for Conquest.
His films focused on personal or social issues that particularly concerned him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first such "issue" film was Gentleman's Agreement, with Gregory Peck, which dealt with antisemitism in the United States. It received eight Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan's first for Best Director. It was followed by Pinky, one of the first films in mainstream Hollywood to address racial prejudice against African Americans. A Streetcar Named Desire, an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed, received twelve Oscar nominations, winning four, and was Marlon Brando's breakthrough role. Three years later, he directed Brando again in On the Waterfront, a film about union corruption on New York's waterfront. It also received twelve Oscar nominations, winning eight. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck's East of Eden, starring James Dean.
A turning point in Kazan's career came with his testimony as a "friendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952 at the height of the Hollywood blacklist. His decision to cooperate and name names brought him strong negative reactions from many friends and associates. His harshly anti-communist testimony "damaged if not shattered the careers of his former colleagues, Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, both actors, and the playwright Clifford Odets". In his memoirs, Kazan writes that he and Odets had made a pact at the time to name each other in front of the committee. Kazan later justified his actions by saying he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong"."Scorsese gets personal in his A Letter to Elia" Gulf News, September 6, 2010. Nearly a half-century later, his 1952 HUAC testimony continued to cause controversy. When Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors chose not to applaud as 250 demonstrators picketed the event.
Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s with his provocative, issue-driven subjects. Director Stanley Kubrick called him "without question, the best director we have in America, [and] capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses".Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Faber and Faber, Inc. (1980; 1999).International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 2: Directors, St. James Press (1997) pp. 519–522. Film author Ian Freer concludes that even "if his achievements are tainted by political controversy, the debt Hollywood—and actors everywhere—owes him is enormous".Freer, Ian. Movie Makers: 50 Iconic Directors, Quercus Publishing (London) (2009) pp. 84–85. Orson Welles said "Kazan is a traitor ... [but] he is a very good director". In 2010, Martin Scorsese co-directed the documentary film A Letter to Elia as a personal tribute to Kazan."Scorsese Film Defends Anti-Communist Informer Kazan" ABC News, September 4, 2010."A Letter to Elia" Variety, September 4, 2010.
Early life Elia Kazan was born as Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7, 1909, in the Chalcedon (now Kadıköy) district of Constantinople (now Istanbul), to Cappadocian Greek parents, Athena () and George Kazantzoglou, who were originally from Kayseri in Anatolia. Elia was named after his paternal grandfather, Elias Kazantzoglou; his maternal grandfather was Isaak Shishmanoglou. The family's surname comes from the Turkish Kazancı (), meaning "pot maker", and oğlu, a patronymic meaning "son [of]". Family members emigrated to the United States, where Elias and his mother arrived on July 8, 1913.
Kazan was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church and attended Greek Orthodox services every Sunday, where he had to stand for several hours with his father. His mother read the Bible but did not go to church. When Kazan was about eight years old, the family moved to New Rochelle, New York, and his father sent him to a Catholic catechism school because there was no Orthodox church nearby. When meeting with the Turkish filmmaker Yılmaz Güney, it was revealed he had retained fluency in the Turkish language from childhood.
As a young boy, he was remembered as being shy, and his college classmates characterized him as more of a loner. Much of his early life was portrayed in his autobiographical book, America America, which he made into a 1963 film. In it, he describes his family as "alienated" from both their parents' Greek Orthodox values and from those of "mainstream America". His mother's family were cotton merchants who imported cotton from England and sold it wholesale. His father had become a rug merchant after immigrating to the US, and he expected his son to take over the family business someday.
After attending public schools through high school, Kazan enrolled at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he helped pay his way by waiting tables and washing dishes; he still graduated cum laude. He also worked as a bartender at various fraternities but never joined one. While a student at Williams, he earned the nickname "Gadg" (for Gadget) because, he said, "I was small, compact, and handy to have around." The nickname was eventually taken up by his stage and film stars.
In America America, Kazan recounts how and why his family left Turkey for the United States. Kazan observes that much of it came from stories that he heard as a young boy. He says during an interview that "it's all true: the wealth of the family was put on the back of a donkey, and my uncle, really still a boy, went to Istanbul ... to gradually bring the family there to escape the oppressive circumstances. ... It's also true that he lost the money on the way, and when he got there he swept rugs in a little store."
Kazan noted some of the controversial aspects of what he put in the film: "I used to say to myself when I was making the film that America was a dream of total freedom in all areas." To make his point, the character who portrays Kazan's uncle Avraam kisses the ground when he gets through customs, while the Statue of Liberty and the American flag are in the background. Kazan had considered whether that kind of scene might be too much for American audiences:
Before undertaking America America, Kazan wanted to confirm many of the details about his family's background. At one point, he sat his parents down and recorded their answers to his questions. He remembers eventually asking his father a "deeper question: 'Why America? What were you hoping for? His mother gave him the answer: "A.E. brought us here." Kazan states that A.E.' was my uncle Avraam Elia, the one who left the Anatolian village with the donkey. At twenty-eight, somehow—this was the wonder—he made his way to New York. He sent home money and in time brought my father over. Father sent for my mother and my baby brother and me when I was four." (Elia's brother, Avraam, was born in Berlin and later became a psychiatrist.) Kazan writes of America America, "It's my favorite of all the films I've made, the first film that was entirely mine."
Career 1930s: Stage career
In 1932, after spending two years at the Yale University School of Drama, he moved to New York City to become a professional stage actor. He continued his professional studies at the Juilliard School, where he studied singing with Lucia Dunham. His first opportunity came with a small group of actors engaged in presenting plays containing "social commentary". They were called the Group Theatre, which showcased many lesser-known plays with deep social or political messages. After struggling to be accepted by them, he discovered his first strong sense of self in America within the "family of the Group Theatre, and more loosely in the radical social and cultural movements of the time", writes film author Joanna E. Rapf.
In his autobiography, Kazan writes of the "lasting impact on him of the Group", noting in particular Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman as "father figures", along with his close friendship with playwright Clifford Odets. During an interview with Michel Ciment, Kazan described the Group:
Kazan also praised Strasberg as a vital leader of the Group:
Kazan's first national success came as a New York theatrical director. Although initially he worked as an actor on stage, and told early in his acting career that he had no acting ability, he surprised many critics by becoming one of the Group's most capable actors. In 1935 he played the role of a strike-leading taxi driver in a drama by Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty, and his performance was called "dynamic", leading some to label him the "proletarian thunderbolt". Among the themes that would run through all of his work were "personal alienation and an outrage over social injustice", writes film critic William Baer. Other critics have likewise noted his "strong commitment to the social and social psychological—rather than the purely political—implications of drama".
By the mid-1930s, when he was 26, Kazan began directing a number of the Group Theatre's plays, including Robert Ardrey's well-known play Thunder Rock. In 1942, he achieved his first notable success by directing a play by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Tallulah Bankhead and Fredric March. The play, though controversial, was a critical and commercial success and won Wilder a Pulitzer Prize. Kazan won the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Director and Bankhead for Best Actress. Kazan then went on to direct Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and then directed A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, both of which were also successful. Kazan's wife, Molly Thacher, the reader for the Group, discovered Williams and awarded him a "prize that launched his career".
The Group Theatre's summer rehearsal headquarters was at Pine Brook Country Club, located in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut, during the 1930s and early 1940s. Along with Kazan were numerous other artists, including Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Luise Rainer, Frances Farmer, Will Geer, Howard da Silva, Clifford Odets, Lee J. Cobb, and Irwin Shaw.
1940s: The Actors Studio, early films In 1940, Kazan had a large supporting role as a flamboyantly dressed gangster in the boxing thriller City for Conquest starring James Cagney, Ann Sheridan, and Anthony Quinn. His stylishly distinctive but raffish clothing seems to have been copied by Frank Sinatra a decade and a half later, and his part is both sympathetic and extremely dramatic. In 1947, he founded the Actors Studio, a non-profit workshop, with actors Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford. In 1951, Lee Strasberg became its director after Kazan left for Hollywood to focus on his career as a movie director. It remained a non-profit enterprise. Strasberg introduced the "Method" to the Actors Studio, an umbrella term for a constellation of systems based on Konstantin Stanislavski's teachings. The "Method" school of acting became the predominant system of post-World War II Hollywood.