Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July, 1913, when he was four years old. By the time he died in his Manhattan apartment on the 28th of September, 2003, The New York Times had called him "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".
He helped invent Method Acting, launched the careers of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Warren Beatty, and directed films that collected dozens of Academy Awards. Then, in 1952, he walked into a congressional hearing room and gave the names of eight former colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The act would follow him for the rest of his life.
How did a shy immigrant boy who was told early in his career that he had no acting ability become the defining figure of American stage and screen for a generation? And how did one afternoon of testimony fracture that legacy so deeply that, nearly half a century later, a room full of Hollywood's most celebrated artists could not agree on whether to applaud him?
Chalcedon, the district of Constantinople where Kazan was born, is now called Kadikoy. His parents, Athena and George Kazantzoglou, came originally from Kayseri in Anatolia. The family surname traces back to the Turkish word "kazanci," meaning pot maker, combined with the patronymic "oglu," meaning son of. Kazan later noted that surnames of that type were historically associated with Jewish people, and that most of the rest of his family carried Biblical Jewish first names.
After the family settled in New Rochelle, New York, his father sent young Elia to a Catholic catechism school because no Greek Orthodox church was nearby. He had grown up attending Orthodox services every Sunday, standing for several hours beside his father. His mother read the Bible but did not attend church.
At Williams College in Massachusetts, he waited tables and washed dishes to help pay his way, and still graduated cum laude. He also worked as a bartender at various fraternities but never joined one. There he earned the nickname "Gadg," short for Gadget, because, he explained, "I was small, compact, and handy to have around." The name stuck, and his future film stars would eventually use it too.
His maternal grandfather was Isaak Shishmanoglou. His brother Avraam was born in Berlin and later became a psychiatrist. The family had described themselves, in Kazan's own telling, as "alienated" from both their parents' Greek Orthodox values and from those of mainstream America.
In 1932, after two years at the Yale School of Drama, Kazan moved to New York City and joined the Group Theatre. He had been told early on that he had no acting ability. He surprised his critics. By 1935, he was playing a strike-leading taxi driver in Clifford Odets's play Waiting for Lefty. His performance was called "dynamic," and some critics labeled him the "proletarian thunderbolt."
Kazan described the Group, in an interview with Michel Ciment, as "the best thing professionally that ever happened to me." He named Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman as "father figures." At their first summer together, Strasberg and Clurman had been blunt: "You may have talent for something, but it's certainly not acting."
His wife, Molly Thacher, served as the Group's reader and discovered Tennessee Williams, awarding him a prize that launched his career. The Group's summer rehearsal headquarters in those years was at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut. Among those working alongside Kazan there were John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, and Irwin Shaw.
By the mid-1930s, when he was 26, Kazan had begun directing Group productions. In 1942, he directed Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Tallulah Bankhead and Fredric March. The play won Wilder a Pulitzer Prize, and Kazan won the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Director.
In 1947, Kazan co-founded the Actors Studio in New York with Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford. It was a non-profit workshop, and when Kazan left for Hollywood in 1951 to focus on film directing, Lee Strasberg took over as director. Strasberg brought what he called the "Method" to the Studio, an umbrella term for a constellation of techniques rooted in Konstantin Stanislavski's teachings. The Method became the dominant approach in post-World War II Hollywood.
Among Strasberg's students at the Studio were Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Karl Malden, Patricia Neal, Maureen Stapleton, and Eli Wallach. Kazan himself directed Malden and Marlon Brando in the Studio's production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
Kazan's conviction about casting ran deep. He believed casting the right actors accounted for 90% of a film's success or failure. He preferred unknown actors, explaining that big stars had "bad habits" and were "not pliable anymore." He described his method for getting to know them: "I take them to dinner. I talk to them. I meet their wives. I find out what the hell the human material is that I'm dealing with."
Actor Robert De Niro called Kazan "a master of a new kind of psychological and behavioral faith in acting." Kazan was honest about his own limits as a director: "I don't have great range. I am no good with music or spectacles. The classics are beyond me. I am a mediocre director except when a play or film touches a part of my life's experience."
The first major actors Kazan launched through his preference for unknowns included Eva Marie Saint, James Dean, Lee Remick, Andy Griffith, Jack Palance, and Warren Beatty.
Kazan's rule for his own work was stated plainly: "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, appeared in 1945. Two years later, he directed Gentleman's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, which confronted antisemitism in the United States. The film received eight Oscar nominations and won three, including Kazan's first Academy Award for Best Director.
In 1951, A Streetcar Named Desire received twelve Oscar nominations and won four. It was Marlon Brando's breakthrough. Kazan later described the tension of adapting a stage play to film, noting how he had deliberately made the set smaller as the story progressed to preserve what he called "the compression": the sense that these people were trapped in a room with each other.
In 1954, On the Waterfront starred Brando again in a film about corruption within New York's longshoremen's union. Life magazine called it the "most brutal movie of the year" but also praised its "year's tenderest love scenes." The film received twelve Oscar nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Brando. It was also the screen debut of Eva Marie Saint, who recalled that Kazan had discovered her chemistry with Brando during an improvisational audition exercise. Saint won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Composer Leonard Bernstein provided On the Waterfront's score. The following year, Kazan directed East of Eden with James Dean. Dean flew back to Los Angeles with Kazan in 1954, bringing his clothes in a brown paper bag. It was the first time Dean had ever flown. James Dean died the following year, at the age of 24, in an accident involving his sports car about 200 miles north of Los Angeles. East of Eden was the only completed film he ever saw.
In April 1952, at the height of the Hollywood blacklist, the House Un-American Activities Committee called Kazan before it under oath. When Kazan was in his mid-20s, during the Depression years of 1934 to 1936, he had been a member of the Communist Party USA. The committee asked him to identify Communists from that period sixteen years earlier.
Kazan initially refused to provide names. He then gave eight former Group Theatre members he said had been Communists: Clifford Odets, J. Edward Bromberg, Lewis Leverett, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Tony Kraber, Ted Wellman, and Paula Miller, who had later married Lee Strasberg. Two days after his testimony, he took out an advertisement in The New York Times explaining his reasons and urging others to follow his example.
In his memoirs, Kazan describes a pact he and Odets had made at the time to name each other before the committee. His harshly anti-communist testimony, the source notes, "damaged if not shattered the careers of his former colleagues, Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, both actors, and the playwright Clifford Odets." He later received a letter detailing specifically how his naming of Art Smith had harmed that actor's career.
Orson Welles, speaking at the Cinematheque francaise in Paris in 1982, said: "Elia Kazan is a traitor. He is a man who sold to McCarthy all his companions at a time when he could continue to work in New York at high salary, and having sold all his people to McCarthy, he then made a film called On the Waterfront which was a celebration of the informer." The audience applauded. Welles then added: "I have to add that he is a very good director."
Kazan justified his actions by saying he had taken "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong." Decades later, he wrote that he felt no lingering guilt: "There's a normal sadness about hurting people, but I'd rather hurt them a little than hurt myself a lot." Through those difficult years, he called Tennessee Williams "the most loyal and understanding friend I had through those black months."
At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro presented Kazan with an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. What followed was unlike any moment in the ceremony's history. Dozens of actors refused to applaud, and 250 demonstrators picketed outside the event.
Among those who did not clap were Nick Nolte, Amy Madigan, and Ed Harris. Among those who stood and gave a standing ovation were Warren Beatty, Meryl Streep, Kathy Bates, and Karl Malden. Producer George Stevens Jr., who stood and applauded, reflected afterward that he believed he and Beatty were both standing "out of regard for the creativity, the stamina and the many fierce battles and lonely nights that had gone into the man's twenty motion pictures."
In an interview for the Associated Press that evening, Liam Neeson said: "We are honoring an extraordinary artist. Period. That's what this evening's about." Kazan, receiving the award, ended his acceptance speech with: "I want to thank you all very much. I think I can just slip away."
The controversy had been long in coming. Kazan had already been denied accolades by the American Film Institute and other critics' associations before the Academy acted. Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan argued that "the only criterion for an award like this is the work." Former Los Angeles Film Critics Association vice president Joseph McBride countered that an honorary award recognizes "the totality of what he represents, and Kazan's career, post 1952, was built on the ruin of other people's careers."
In 1976, Kazan had stated plainly: "I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did, and betray my own soul. I didn't betray it. I made a difficult decision." In 2010, Martin Scorsese co-directed A Letter to Elia, a documentary tribute that won a Peabody Award that year.
Under Kazan's direction, his actors received 24 Academy Award nominations and won nine Oscars. Seven of his films won a total of 20 Academy Awards. He won Best Director twice, for Gentleman's Agreement and On the Waterfront.
Marlon Brando, in his autobiography, described Kazan as "the best actors' director by far of any I've worked for," adding that he was "the only one who ever really stimulated me, got into a part with me and virtually acted it with me." Director Stanley Kubrick called Kazan "without question, the best director we have in America, capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses."
Dustin Hoffman commented that he "doubted whether he, Robert De Niro, or Al Pacino, would have become actors without Mr. Kazan's influence." Director Nicholas Ray considered him "the best actor's director the United States has ever produced."
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan presented him with the Kennedy Center honors award. At the ceremony, screenwriter Budd Schulberg said: "Elia Kazan has touched us all with his capacity to honor not only the heroic man, but the hero in every man."
His personal papers and film materials are held in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, open to scholars and researchers worldwide. Tennessee Williams, in a letter to Kazan written in 1959, offered his own measure of the man: "Some day you will know how much I value the great things you did with my work, how you lifted it above its measure by your great gift."
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Common questions
Who was Elia Kazan and why is he important in film history?
Elia Kazan was a Greek-American film and theatre director born in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, and described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history." He co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947, helped introduce Method Acting to Hollywood, and launched the careers of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Warren Beatty, among many others.
What did Elia Kazan testify about before the HUAC in 1952?
In April 1952, Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named eight former Group Theatre members he said had been Communists, including Clifford Odets, Morris Carnovsky, and Paula Miller. He had himself been a Communist Party member during 1934-1936 and later took out an advertisement in The New York Times urging others to follow his example.
How many Academy Award nominations did films directed by Elia Kazan receive?
Seven of Kazan's films won a total of 20 Academy Awards, and his actors alone received 24 Oscar nominations and won nine. Kazan himself won Best Director twice, for Gentleman's Agreement in 1947 and On the Waterfront in 1954.
Why was Elia Kazan's 1999 Honorary Oscar controversial?
When Kazan received an Honorary Oscar at the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, the audience was sharply divided because of his 1952 HUAC testimony. Actors including Nick Nolte, Amy Madigan, and Ed Harris refused to applaud, while 250 demonstrators picketed outside. Others, including Warren Beatty, Meryl Streep, and Karl Malden, gave him a standing ovation.
What films did Elia Kazan direct with Marlon Brando?
Kazan directed Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), which received twelve Oscar nominations and won four; Viva Zapata! (1952); and On the Waterfront (1954), which received twelve Oscar nominations and won eight, including Best Actor for Brando. Brando later wrote that Kazan was "the best actors' director by far of any I've worked for."
How did Elia Kazan discover James Dean?
Kazan saw James Dean perform on stage in New York, then cast him as the lead in East of Eden (1955) after an audition, also giving him an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Dean flew back to Los Angeles with Kazan in 1954 carrying his clothes in a brown paper bag; it was the first time Dean had ever flown. East of Eden was the only completed film Dean ever saw before his death at age 24.
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88 references cited across the entry
- 3Ελία Καζάν, 28 Σεπτεμβρίου 20032023-09-28
- 5NewsA McCarthy Era Memory That Can Still ChillBernard Weinraub — January 16, 1997
- 7NewsAmid Protests Elia Kazan Receives His OscarBernard Weinraub — March 22, 1999
- 8When Orson Welles Denounced Elia Kazan as a Traitor for Giving Other Filmmakers' Names to Joe McCarthy (1982)Michael Warburton — Open Culture — 25 January 2023
- 13BookKazan: the master director discusses his films: interviews with Elia KazanYoung, Jeff — Newmarket Press — 2001
- 14BookGreat movie directorsTed Sennett — Abrams — 1986
- 17A Legendary Director From KayseriYüksel Kalkan — 2021
- 19Justice to Elia KazanHarry Stein — March 23, 2023
- 20VideoElia Kazan vs Yilmaz Güney - Le Mur - Die Mauer - Duvar1299Darren — 2012-06-15
- 21NewsTHE VIEW FROM (Published 1979)1979-02-04
- 23NewsNoted Film and Theater Director Elia Kazan DiesSeptember 29, 2003
- 24A Great Filmmaker and a Complex ManPamela J. Johnson — USC Dornsife — January 1, 2006
- 25NewsElia Kazan, Influential Director, Dies at 94Mervyn Rothstein — September 28, 2003
- 26BookKazan: The Master Director Discusses his FilmsJeff Young — Newmarket Press — 1999
- 27BookKazan on DirectingKazan Elia — Vintage Books — January 2010
- 28NewsMrs. Lucia Dunham, Juilliard TeacherApril 3, 1959
- 29BookElia Kazan: A LifeElia Kazan — Da Capo Press — 1997
- 30BookElia Kazan: InterviewsElia Kazan et al. — University Press of Mississippi — 2000
- 31MagazineMethod Man: Elia Kazan's Singular CareerJohn Lahr — December 13, 2010
- 32BookClifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940Margaret Brenman-Gibson — Atheneum — 1981
- 34BookImages of AmericaTrumbull Historical Society — 1997
- 35BookElia Kazan: A BiographyRichard Schickel — HarperCollins — 2005
- 36BookJames Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel IconographyClaudia Springer — University of Texas Press — 2007
- 37BookThe Making of Rebel Without a CauseDouglas L. Rathgeb — McFarland — 2004
- 38BookStar: How Warren Beatty Seduced AmericaPeter Biskind — Simon & Schuster — 2010
- 39BookNatasha: The Biography of Natalie WoodSuzanne Finstad — Three Rivers Press — 2001
- 40America AmericaAdministrator
- 42News'The Visitors' Portrays Ordeal of a Threatened G.I.Vincent Canby — 1972-02-03
- 43A New Blu-ray of Elia Kazan's Most Obscure Film Offers a Tantalizing Glimpse of What Could've BeenJim Hemphill — 2024-11-22
- 44NewsElia Kazan: 'The Movie We Made Is Realistic Hollywood'Alden Whitman — 1976-11-14
- 45Unproduced Tennessee Williams screenplay finally reaching movie theatersDavid Ng — November 25, 2009
- 46NewsCountdown to the Oscars: No Oscar love for casting directorsReed Johnson — February 21, 2011
- 47BookConversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden AgeGeorge Jr. Stevens — Alfred A. Knopf — 2006
- 48BookOn the WaterfrontJoanna E. Rapf — Cambridge University Press — 2003
- 49BookScreening Politics: The Politician in American MoviesHarry Keyishian — Rowman & Littlefield — 2003
- 50BookThe Good, the Bad, and Me: In My AnecdotageEli Wallach — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — 2005
- 51BookKazan: The Master Director Discusses his films – Interviews with Elia KazanJeff Young — Newmarket Press — 1999
- 52NewsElia Kazan, an actor's directorSusan King — February 17, 2010
- 53BookFriendly Enemies: Maximizing the Director–Actor RelationshipDelia Salvi — Watson-Guptill — 2002
- 54BookHillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the MoviesJerry Wayne Williamson — University of North Carolina Press — 1995
- 55MagazineTender is the PlightMarie Brenner — January 1977
- 56BookBrando: Songs My Mother Taught MeMarlon Brando et al. — Random House — 1994
- 57Postage Paid: In defense of Elia KazanMichael Mills — Modern Times
- 58JournalElia Kazan and the House Un-American Activities CommitteeRoger Tailleur — Fall 1966
- 59The People Kazan NamedYael Schacher — 16 March 1999
- 60NewsDirector Names Stage RedsApril 12, 1952
- 61BookNaming NamesVictor Navasky — Viking Press — 1980
- 62NewsElia Kazan: The Ferocious Look BackMegan Rosenfeld — 25 June 1988
- 63BookHow We Forgot the Cold War: A Journey Across AmericaJon Wiener — University of California Press — 2012
- 64A Statement by Elia Kazan (New York Times, 12 April 1952)Reel Classics
- 65Arthur Miller versus Elia Kazan, revisitedAllan M. Jalon — December 26, 2009
- 66NewsKazan Honor Stirs Protest By Blacklist SurvivorsBernard Weinraub — February 23, 1999
- 67NewsCheerful DebaucheryAda Calhoun — 2012-04-20
- 69BookWhat Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent CareerJoseph McBride — University Press of Kentucky — 2006
- 70NamesJoel Hirschhorn — December 4, 2001
- 71Director Elia Kazan Dies; Former Sandy Hook ResidentDorothy Evans
- 72BookElia Kazan: An American OdysseyBloomsbury — 1988
- 73La mort d'Elia KazanOctober 2, 2003
- 74NewsCarol Drinkwater reveals sex attack by Hollywood director Elia KazanClaire Armitstead — 2017-10-20
- 82Elia KazanHollywood Walk of Fame — October 25, 2019
- 84The Reid Cinema ArchivesWesleyan University
- 85Praise and silent protest greet Kazan's OscarMarch 22, 1999
- 86Many Refuse to Clap as Kazan Receives OscarMarch 22, 1999
- 87Full Frame Benefit Screening of Martin Scorsese's 'A Letter to Elia'Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University — November 16, 2010