Word: elias
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...ELIA KAZAN THE LISTENER...
...wonderful thing about him," Elia Kazan once said of his greatest actor, Marlon Brando, "is the ambivalence--between a soft, yearning, girlish side and a dissatisfaction that is violent and can be dangerous." Danger was the business of the tireless and insinuating Kazan in the 1940s and '50s, when he was something no one before or since has been: simultaneously America's leading theatrical (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman) and movie (On the Waterfront) director. He was not so much a great imagist as a great listener to, manipulator and appreciator of, the sometimes dissonant music...
...Gift of Energy Elia Kazan, who died in September at age 94 [Milestones, Oct. 13], published his memoir when he was 78. We called his autobiography "bustling" and "bruising," and our review described the compulsive drive that fueled Kazan's success...
...changed everything. Before ELIA KAZAN, movie and stage acting occupied a realm of easy glamour. Actors prized articulation; even street-bred stars like Cagney and Stanwyck spoke with a cutting efficiency. But with A Streetcar Named Desire, the Tennessee Williams play Kazan directed on Broadway in 1947 and filmed in 1951, pop culture was yanked into real life...
Kazan rose from the class he later re-created with such acuity. He was born Elia Kazanjoglou to Greek parents who immigrated to America. He acted in the Group Theatre, then shone as the director of plays by Williams, Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller. In 1947 Kazan co-founded the Actors Studio, which spawned several generations of serious stars. His direction of Brando in On the Waterfront and James Dean in East of Eden defined and sanctified the image of the beautiful, battered outsider...