Elia Kazan: The stage and film director, Elia Kazan, who has died aged 94, outlived many friends and enemies; yet there are actors everywhere still working towards a mystery he did so much to define.
He helped found the Actors' Studio in New York, and its whole scheme of psychological naturalism; he directed the first stage productions of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman; he made movies like Viva Zapata!, On The Waterfront and East Of Eden; he was a father-figure to Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Rod Steiger and Warren Beatty.
Yet there are still some left, burned by his testimony to the House Un-American Activities committee in the McCarthyite 1950s, who had not spoken to him in more than 45 years, and who crossed the street to avoid him.
Kazan was a scoundrel, maybe; he was not always reliable company or a nice man. But he was a monumental figure, the greatest magician with actors of his time, a superlative stage director, a filmmaker of real glory, a novelist, and finally, a brave, candid, egotistical, self-lacerating and defiant autobiographer - a great, dangerous man, someone his enemies were lucky to have.
He was edgy, belligerent, seductive, rhapsodic, brutal, a soaring humanist one moment and a piratical womaniser the next. Until old age and illness overcame him, he was ferociously and competitively alive. To be with him was to know that he could also have been a hypnotic actor or an inspiring political leader.
Elia Kazanjoglous was in the tradition of that 19th-century generation that went to America from a hostile Europe, penniless and speechless, and, among much else, pioneered the picture business. An Anatolian Greek, born in what was then still Constantinople, he was four years old when his parents set out for America as rug dealers.
In time, everyone would remark on what a success he had become, but he was always an aggrieved outsider, an angry, thrusting intruder - at Williams College, Massachusetts, and the Yale School of Drama, friendless, he said, fuming at being ignored by the lovely WASP girls, until they were moved by his alien intensity.
From Yale, he joined the Group Theatre in New York as a small part actor and stage manager, appearing in notable productions of two Clifford Odets plays - Waiting For Lefty (1935) and Golden Boy (1937). With the photographer, Ralph Steiner, he directed his first film, the 20-minute documentary, People Of The Cumberland. With his first wife, Molly Day Thacher (a writer and teacher, and a great force in his life), he also joined the Communist Party, like many young people in the arts who wanted a more hopeful way ahead than the Depression.
But Kazan was not cut out to be an obedient party member. When a vote was taken on whether he should be allowed to stay in the party, he got just one vote - his own. So he became an outcast; even in the zealous 1930s, he hated the secrecy and could not abide the suppression of individuality.
By the late 1930s, he was finding himself, as a director of plays. Though he acted in two movies - City For Conquest (1940) and Blues In The Night (1941), and he is good in both - he never fancied his long-term chances as more than a villain or a character actor. He longed to be heroic, so he seized creative power in the theatre at what proved a crucial moment.
In less than a decade, he was responsible for a series of fine plays, including Irwin Shaw's Quiet City, Arthur Miller's All My Sons, and - opening on December 3rd, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore theatre - A Streetcar Named Desire.
Why was that night so important in Broadway and American history? In part, it was the full delivery of Williams's talent after the promise of The Glass Menagerie. In part, it was because of a new physical intensity in the acting, of psychologically enriched behaviour, as embodied in Marlon Brando, the actor Kazan chose to play Stanley Kowalski. And Kazan, by then, was working his way towards an American way of acting (much influenced by Stanislavsky).
For it was in 1947 that he, Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford founded the Actors' Studio, the home of the "Method". Only later did the studio take in Lee Strasberg, who had been one of Kazan's early teachers at the Group Theatre. But the Actors' Studio style would prove enormously influential in its stress on inner truths to be mined by the actor - indeed, it was a method that made a cult of the brooding actor, turning him from professional interpreter to creative genius.
Kazan was ambitious for movies, though he was still a far better director on stage. He had made his first feature, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, in 1945, and followed this with respectable, if dull, movies - Sea Of Grass, a drama with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; Gentleman's Agreement, which, though not a very fluent film, won Oscars for best picture and direction in 1947; Panic In The Streets, a good thriller; and the movie of Streetcar, with the Broadway cast, except for Vivien Leigh, who was deemed more commercial than Jessica Tandy. The movie gives some feeling of the stage production, but it was restricted by censorship problems.
Kazan did not give up the stage: indeed, he directed Lee J. Cobb in the 1949 premiere of Death Of A Salesman; and, in the 1950s, he handled the first productions of Camino Real, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird Of Youth, all by Williams; and The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs, by William Inge. But he was becoming more cinematic, and - some said - more of the Hollywood person he liked to despise.
There was also a crisis coming, a personal drama in which Kazan was not just a character, but director and author, too. He was to become himself against the world, his own lone vote, his anger justified.
In 1952, from a script by John Steinbeck, he released the film of Viva Zapata!, with Brando as the Mexican peasant leader. It is Hollywood radicalism, if you will: the rebel is a romantic hero, and his opponents are dishonest men. But the movie worked. Brando was fully engaged; there was passion and myth on the screen, as Kazan had never managed before.
And then he heard that the House Committee on Un-American Activities, active since 1947, wanted to talk to him. There was a questioning session, early in 1952, at which he refused to name names. Powerful people in the picture business told him his career was in jeopardy. So he went back and named names.
"Concerned friends," he would write, "have asked me why I didn't take the 'decent' alternative, tell everything about myself, and not name the others in the group. But in the end, that was not what I wanted. Perhaps ex-communists are particularly unrelenting against the party. I believed that this committee, which everyone scorned - I had plenty against them, too - had a proper duty. I wanted to break open the secrecy." In which case, of course, he should have talked the first time. The defence was typical of Kazan; many people would never talk to him again; they saw nastiness in the self-serving defence and predicted moral disaster for the man.
Maybe. A careful reading of Kazan's autobiography, A Life (1988), suggests he was still haunted by his decision decades later. There was also a part of him that relished the solitary ground he had staked, and took strength in the melodrama of recrimination. Yet he had wounded himself. What may be most illuminating is that the "play" he had set off deepened him as an artist and filmmaker, the evidence of which was in the string of films that came next, and which seem to have been made by a new man.
Man On A Tightrope (1953) is about a circus troupe trying to escape the Iron Curtain. On The Waterfront (1954) won Oscars for best picture, for Kazan as director, for Brando in the lead, for Eva Marie Saint as supporting actress, and for Budd Schulberg's script. But Kazan's enemies loathed the film because it was an apologia for informing, and deemed its anti-union stance the final sell-out.
After that there was East Of Eden, with James Dean, another great actor found and nurtured by Kazan; the unexpectedly comic Baby Doll; A Face In The Crowd, about the way a rural demagogue comes to power through the media; Wild River, in which Montgomery Clift plays a Tennessee Valley Authority agent who has to remove Jo Van Fleet from her land so a life-saving dam can be built; and Splendor In The Grass, the debut of Warren Beatty. Seven films that no one who has seen them can forget.
In the 1960s, Kazan shifted ground. He began to write novels, because he thought literature was more noble or worthy than film. He proved to be a page-turning hack - in books like America, America (1962), The Arrangement (1967) and Acts Of Love (1978). They are all readable, yet ordinary.
On the stage, he directed Miller's After The Fall (1964), starring Barbara Loden, his second wife - Molly had died in 1963, but Kazan had been involved with Loden for some years.
He filmed his novel, The Arrangement, in 1969 with Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway and Deborah Kerr in roles that reflected the Kazan-Loden-Molly triangle. Then, in 1971, with his older son, Chris, he did the low-budget The Visitor. Five years later came The Last Tycoon, adapted from Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel. Sam Spiegel was the producer (he had done On The Waterfront); Harold Pinter wrote it; Kazan directed; and the cast included Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson. But all the geniuses seemed to have left their heads at home, and it was Kazan's dullest film.
After Barbara's death in 1980, Kazan married his third wife, Frances Rudge. She survives him, along with five children - Chris, Judy, Katie and Nicholas, a screenwriter and director, by his first wife, and Leo, by his second.
Elia Kazan (Kazanjoglous), director and writer, born September 7th, 1909; died September 28th, 2003