Told he had no talent for acting, Elia Kazan reshaped American acting instead
When Elia Kazan finished an apprentice summer with the Group Theatre, its leaders told him he might have talent for something, but certainly not acting. He went on to co-found the Actors Studio, direct Brando in Streetcar and On the Waterfront, and become one of Hollywood's most honoured and most resented figures.
Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou on 7 September 1909 in Constantinople, to Cappadocian Greek parents; the surname comes from Turkish words meaning son of a pot maker. The family reached the United States in 1913, following an uncle, Avraam Elia, who had left an Anatolian village with the family's wealth on a donkey, lost the money en route, and swept rugs in Istanbul before reaching New York. Kazan later turned that story into America America, which he called his favourite film and the first entirely his own.
His rug-merchant father expected him to join the business. Instead he worked his way through Williams College waiting tables, picking up the nickname Gadg, short for Gadget, because he was small and handy. After Yale's drama school he joined the Group Theatre in 1932, where Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman became father figures. Despite that early verdict, his turn as a strike-leading cabbie in Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty earned him the label proletarian thunderbolt.
Directing proved his true gift. On Broadway he staged Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, then Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire; his wife Molly Thacher had spotted Tennessee Williams early. In film, Gentleman's Agreement, about American antisemitism, brought his first Best Director Oscar, and On the Waterfront, set amid union corruption, won eight Academy Awards. He co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947, where Method Acting took root under Strasberg.
In 1952, testifying cooperatively to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he named names, damaging the careers of former colleagues including Odets, with whom he said he had agreed to name each other. He called it the less intolerable of two painful choices. When he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, 250 protesters picketed and dozens of actors refused to clap. Orson Welles called him a traitor and a very good director.
Source: Elia Kazan
