Word: kazan
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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...
...Kazan] conceived and co-founded the most influential teaching institution in U.S. theater history, the Actors Studio ... In the '60s he would absorb much of the blame for the failed first attempt to establish a repertory theater at New York City's Lincoln Center and amaze himself, among others, by becoming a best-selling novelist (The Arrangement). A sense of worthlessness, Kazan says, is what drove him. It stemmed from his foreignness (he immigrated to the U.S. with his Greek parents when he was four); his lack of social status at Williams College, which he worked his way through...
...later years, Kazan was one of those. He was never forgiven for identifying himself and a few old friends as onetime communists before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Tributes to the old lion were booed, boycotted, canceled. His enemies forgot that even belated opposition to Soviet communism at its most rapacious could be an act of principle as well as expediency--and that an artist's most telling testimony is his work. By that standard, Kazan was an admirable American original. --By Richard Corliss