Actor Ben Gazzara has been around long enough to have no qualms about speaking his mind. He says, for example, that agents have never done actors any good. "Okay, you have them to talk money," he says. "Actors are babies, so we need daddies to talk for us, daddies to make our deals. But agents can't give a client heat if he doesn't have any. An agent never helped me get a role. Any role I got is because someone came to me. It's word of mouth—always will be."
The 75-year-old New York native is equally forthright in his description of Hollywood, where he lived expensively—and unhappily—for many years. "I had the house in Bel Air, the pool, the Japanese gardener, the kids in private schools, and the wife in psychoanalysis." He pauses reflectively before adding, "It was worth it for a time. But Orson Welles put it this way: 'I went to Hollywood when I was 23, stepped into a garden surrounded by a pool...and fell asleep. When I woke up, I was 65.' It's an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. My biggest regret is that I stayed there as long as I did and didn't do more theatre."
Gazzara is currently starring in Awake and Sing!, Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Clifford Odets' 1935 drama and the actor's first Broadway appearance since 1992. He plays Jacob, an aging Russian-Jewish Marxist who finds solace in beloved recordings of Caruso as his family unravels financially and emotionally. Jacob is the play's moral center.
"When I read the play, I was moved, touched, and struck by its poetry," Gazzara says. "It also has nostalgic appeal. I met Clifford when I was in End as a Man," a 1953 play that marked Gazzara's Broadway debut. "Lee Strasberg had brought Clifford down to see me, and he was very flattering. And since then, of course, knowing Clifford's story, I'm so happy to see that his work is being done again and that I'm part of it. Clifford's career started like a rocket and then suffered a terrible demise during the McCarthy era. I've always felt he was up there with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller."
Elaborating on his personal connection to Odets, Gazzara adds, "I came out of the Actors Studio, which is a child of the Group Theatre," the company founded by Strasberg, director-critic Harold Clurman, and producer Cheryl Crawford that launched Odets' career. "The Group Theatre is my grandfather. And the scene I did to get into the Actors Studio was Night Music, a play by Odets. So in some ways I feel I've come full circle."
Gazzara has earned three Tony nominations for his work on Broadway (1955's A Hatful of Rain, 1975's Hughie/Duet, and 1976's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), a Theatre World Award for End as a Man, and a Drama Desk Award nomination for his solo turn in Nobody Don't Like Yogi (2004). Despite his remarks about Hollywood, he's had a distinguished career there, too. He won an Emmy Award for his work in the TV movie Hysterical Blindness (2002), although he may be best known to small-screen audiences for his starring role on the dramatic series Run for Your Life (1965–68), in which he played a San Francisco lawyer with a terminal disease who sets out to make every moment count.
But the high visibility and income that came with Run for Your Life did not compensate for Gazzara's distress while doing the show, he says. "In my day, television was the third tier of a career. It was way before the era of actors making a million dollars an episode. You could live well, but I came from New York, where we did Tennessee Williams and O'Neill. On television, I was playing the same character in the same situation week after week after week. It took its toll. I would not want to do another series—that's for kids."
Gazzara has also been seen in dozens of films, including three directed by John Cassavetes (Husbands, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night), two directed by Peter Bogdanovich (Saint Jack and They All Laughed), plus Anatomy of a Murder, Capone, The Spanish Prisoner, The Big Lebowski, Dogville, and the upcoming Paris, je t'aime.
Working with Cassavetes, Gazzara says, was a high point of his career: "He did not want actors to be better than they were, only as good as they were. John created a climate for the actor where he could do no wrong. It was liberating." He adds, "All of his movies were based on scripts that existed from the beginning. These were not improvised films, but because of the way we worked, they looked improvised. That was the style."
Typecasting, Gazzara asserts, has never been a problem for him. "In End as a Man, I was an effete Southern homosexual; in Hatful of Rain, I was a drug addict; and now, 50 years later, I'm an old Jew," he says. "Nobody ever knew what to do with me because I wasn't easily pigeonholed. I got offered those gangster roles because I'm Italian, and I turned a lot of them down because I didn't want to be typecast—not that there aren't some wonderful gangsters that I've played. All the characters I've done have been my babies. When you play a role, you have to fall in love with that role. Even Richard III—I'd love him to death."
Today, as a survivor of oral cancer that caused vocal damage, Gazzara cannot play all the roles he might have wanted to, though the slight rasp in his voice is barely noticeable. "I will continue to work, but I know I can't do everything, like King Lear," he says. "I no longer have the vocal apparatus."
Growing up on East 29th Street in Manhattan, Gazzara, the son of Sicilian immigrants, got into acting by chance. "There was a boys club near where I lived that had a drama group, and I had a friend who was appearing in it," he recalls. "When I heard the applause he got, I was jealous and wanted to get into the club, too. My first role was a 75-year-old Arab. I was 12. But when I smelled the greasepaint, felt the glue from the beard on my face and the spotlight on me, I thought this might be the way to get off the corner."
At the City College of New York, Gazzara majored in drama; later he attended the Dramatic Workshop, a renowned acting school of the 1940s and '50s founded by German teacher Erwin Piscator, and finally joined the Actors Studio, where his classmates included such icons as James Dean, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Kim Stanley, and Geraldine Page. Once an actor is accepted into the Studio, Gazzara explains, there are no fees and he or she is a member for life: "It's not a school, it's a studio, and a member can come in and work on a scene anytime. I was an active participant from 1952 to 1963. We'd meet for two hours a week in what was known as 'sessions,' where we'd do our scenes." Some of those scenes resulted in his being cast in full productions, including End as a Man, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Hatful of Rain. And his stage performances paved the way for work onscreen. "When I was starting out in Hollywood, producers found you in theatre," he recalls. "[Director] Otto Preminger saw me in a play, which led to my being cast in Anatomy of a Murder. I don't know how actors move ahead today. Now television is a showcase for talent."
If he were a young man today, moving ahead in acting might not be a high priority, as Gazzara suspects he'd be focused on writing instead. He has already published a memoir, In the Moment: My Life as an Actor, and is currently finishing his first novel. "I love the writing process," he says, crediting acting with helping him to appreciate the power of subtlety and subtext. "Working with directors and bringing literature to life has given me a way to approach writing—the idea that truth is often achieved by doing the opposite of what the material seems to be saying."
Still, he has some advice for aspiring actors: "Don't do it. Unless you're insane, unless you love it so much you cannot live without it, unless you're a masochist able to take rejection 90% of the time and acceptance—if you're lucky—10% of the time, then you can be an actor."