Anatomy of an independent actor: goodbye to Ben Gazzara

Yesterday, Friday, February 3, died in Manhattan on actor Ben Gazzara, at 81 years of age and cause of pancreatic cancer, as communicated his lawyer. Donostia Award in 2005, was perhaps the Festival of San Sebastian surrendered only fitting tribute to an actor who has never been nominated for an Oscar, although three Golden Globes, although television movies, did in fact got an Emmy of the four by those being nominated. The same suspicion that Hollywood had toward the actor, the film had it to canning that was done there, which led him to build most of his film career within the independent film.

I will not say movies that say I refused because I'm an idiot. And I was an idiot.

Method Actor

Outstanding student of Lee Strasberg, Ben Gazzara was one of the actors to show that the Actor's Studio was one of the great factories of American actors in the same period in which Marlon Brando or arising Rod Steiger. Like them, his first stop was the Broadway stage, where they demonstrate their ability in the first performance of the work of Tennessee Williams Cat on the roof, along with Barbara Bel Geddes and directed by the principal officer of the method: Elia Kazan . Nominated several times for a Tony award, interpret various works of Eugene O'Neill also be provided to participate in independent works.

Undoubtedly the most notorious professional collaboration that would join John Cassavetes, the one who would know on the set of If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belguim. The former star of Rosemarys Baby will become, by the recently deceased Peter Falk, one of his fetish actors. Later would be relevant only to maintain working relationships with filmmakers such as Peter Bogdanovich Pasquale Festa Campanile or. Born in 1930 in New York, Ben Gazzara tend'ria Italian descent, which led him to develop his film career somewhere between Italy and the United States.

Favored the climate for an actor to feel free to give whatever (meaning Casavettes), and if not working, it does not work.

Ten essential titles

• Anatomy of a Murder

Although his debut in cinema with The Strange One, in 1957, would be a film directed by Otto Preminger in 1959, which would make known to the public. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, among which included Best Picture and a fabulous soundtrack of Duke Ellington, the plot of the movie revolved around a murder by an army lieutenant who had finished in cold blood the life of his wife's rapist. Intense and exciting, the film would become one of the most interesting legal drama movies.

• Husbands / The Killing of a Chinese Bookie / Opening Night

Essentials are all professional collaboration between John and Ben Gazara Casavettes we propose a triple session. Released in 1970, Husbands is awareness of the loss of youth of three friends who meet at the funeral of a room that has died of a heart attack. Six years later assume the role all in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which it becomes an ex-veteran of the Korean War who is forced to commit murder to advance its striptease lounge in Las Vegas. The following year a more secondary character that gives center stage all to Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes close collaboration with with Opening Night, the story of an actress delivered to the theater is unable to admit that age and that arises throughout his career when he witnesses the death of one of his admirers.

• Saint Jack / They All Laughed

The alternative component of the so-called New Hollywood filmmakers premiered in 1979 Saint Jack, in which Ben Gazzara returned to play the owner of another property of dubious morality. This time it was a brothel in Singapore surviving bribing the police, but that will be in big trouble with the arrival of a new police inspector. and consistent with admiration for the classical Hollywood cinema of his generation, Peter Bogdanovich in 1981 signed a title that, while paying tribute to one of the most interesting films of Alfred Hitchcock, focusing on two detectives were hired to follow paths wives of friends who think they are infidels, enamrándose each to the next. But They All Laughed was perhaps more interesting for all that happens around you as if Ben Gazzara and Audrey Hepburn to work together again after having agreed on the set of Bloodline, conducive to have a love affair in the making of the film there would be romance between Bogdanovich and one of his actresses, Dorothy Stratten, who later died in tragic circumstances at the hands of her husband, as recreated in Star 80, Bob Fosse film.

• Storie di ordinary follia

Ben Gazzara played the poet and writer Charles Bukowski in Marco Ferreri's adaptation of his autobiographical novel performed. Ornela Mutti or Susan Tyrrell were some of the actresses who play the extravagant collection of alcoholic and women who crossed the writer's life. FIPRESCI Prize at the Festival of San Sebastian, the film would rise with four Italian Academy Awards.

• Il rowdy

A couple of years before the Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore will rise to the Oscar thanks to Cinema Paradiso, Il premiered rowdy, known equally for his International title The Professor. In it Ben Gazzara plays a prisoner who begins to be enforced after challenge a head of the Italian Camorra older. From jail, "the teacher" organized by the army of the future Italian Camorra, while his sister Rosaria, with the help of his lawyer, get a transfer to a psychiatric hospital as mentally ill, where it gives the leak.

• The Spanish Prisoner

In 1998 the renowned playwright, screenwriter and director David Mamet, he includes in the cast of The Spanish Prisoner. A psychological thriller about a young man who has invented a new process through which your company will get great benefits. Fearing that they may attempt to steal his idea, the protagonist is precipitated in a paranoid delusion that takes you to confuse fantasy and reality.

• Buffalo '66

In the same year he worked with Mamet, also rolled to Vincent Gallo, who debuted in the direction in Buffalo '66. Cult film that brought together a cast of very interesting when we can in contracts to Christina Ricci, Mickey Rourke, Rosanna Arquette and Anjelica Huston. Definitely not a dish for everyone, but it is clear vocation director who seems to emulate the steps of John Cassavettes, also was known as an actor before getting behind the camera.

• The Big Lebowski

I'm pretty sure I need not provide any information about the film that premiered Joel and Ethan Coen, also in 1998. If at first glance it seems that the directors of Fargo conduct a similar tribute to Vincent Gallo, the truth is that the key adaptation and contemporary comic The Big Sleep, were placed in a frame of mind similar to petera Bogdanovich and filmmakers New Hollywood, so I dare say that the object of beneración were none of these filmmakers, but the very Ben Gazzara.

• Happiness

The 1998 harvest still provide a degree Ben Gazzara as stimulating as Happiness, the third film of genuine Todd Solondz, who would stand with award at the Cannes and Toronto, among other accolades. Ben Gazzara played a householder misunderstood that far removed from being the typical American family, it is likely to be more common than the movies made ​​in Hollywood would have us believe.

• Dogville

In his umpteenth criticism of American society, Lars von Trier had for the fabulous Ben Gazzara Dogville sharing. The most controversial filmmaker Denmark stripped of any artifice to focus solely on a text that left no stone cold. With a more theatrical staging that film, he told us a story set in the depths of the United States, where a young woman arrives on the run from someone who will not talk. After his emotional trilogy, consisting of Breaking the Waves, Idioterne and Dancer in the Dark, Lars von Trier began a trilogy that would intellectual complete, although it would still be interesting this title in which some are convinced that Grace is a poor helpless victim, while others see her as a ruthless, manipulative witch.

Photos: Ballybane Esterprise Centre Entertainment & Stars Ciao Mpvie