mon cinéma

Anthony Quinn (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001) was a two-time Academy Award-winning Mexican-American actor, as well as a painter and writer. He is best known for his performances in the popular Hollywood movies Zorba the Greek and Viva Zapata!.

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Trivia
3 Family
4 Painting and writing
5 Quotes
6 External links



[edit] History
He was born Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico to an Irish father and a Mexican mother, a combination that would later allow him to play many different ethnicities. He grew up in the Boyle Heights and the Echo Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, where he attended both Polytechnic High School and later on, Belmont High School. Quinn left school early (much later, he received his first high school diploma from Tucson High School in Tucson, Arizona in the 1990s), and was a prizefighter and a painter before becoming an actor.

Quinn launched his film career playing character roles in several 1936 films, including Parole (his debut) and The Milky Way, after a brief stint in the theater. Quinn remained relegated to playing "ethnic" villains in Paramount films through the 1940s. By 1947, he was a veteran of over 50 films and had played everything from Indians, Mafia dons, Hawaiian chiefs, Filipino freedom-fighters, Chinese guerrillas, and comical Arab sheiks, but he was still not a major star. So he returned to the theater, where for three years he found success on Broadway in such roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.

During the 1950s, Quinn specialized in tough, macho roles, but as the decade ended, he allowed his age to show. His formerly trim physique filled out, his hair grayed, and his once smooth, swarthy face weathered into an appealing series of crags and crinkles. Upon his return to the screen in the early 1950s, Quinn was cast in a series of B-adventures like Mask of the Avenger (1951). He got one of his big breaks playing opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). His supporting role as Zapata's brother won Quinn his first Oscar and after that, Quinn was given larger roles in a variety of features. He went to Italy in 1953 and appeared in several films, turning in one of his best performances as a dim-witted, thuggish, and volatile strongman in Federico Fellini's La Strada, having as his main partner the Italian actress Giulietta Masina (1954). Quinn won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying the painter Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956), all the more remarkable when you consider that he was only onscreen for 8 minutes. The following year, he received another Oscar nomination for George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind.


Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, and Ray Milland in 20th Century Fox film The River's Edge (1957)Anthony portrayed as (Ben Cameron) in "The River's Edge" (1957). Ben and wife (Meg) Debra Paget struggle to build their small ranch in New Mexico desert, Trickster (Nardo Denning) Ray Milland arrived in New Mexico looking for his girlfriend, and her husband. Nardo force Ben at gunpoint to guide him safely to mexico with the stolen money. His careworn demeanor made him a convincing Greek resistance fighter in the war film The Guns of Navarone (1961), an ideal ex-boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight and a natural for the role of Auda ibu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia (both 1962). The success of Zorba the Greek in 1964 was the high water mark of Quinn's career during the 1960s, and offered him another Oscar nomination. He also started in the title role of John Fowles' The Magus. As the decade progressed, the quality of his film work noticeably diminished, though there were some successes such as The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969).

The 1970s offered little change and Quinn became known as a ham, albeit a well-respected one. In 1971, he starred in the short-lived television drama Man in the City. In 1977, He starred in the movie Mohammad, Messenger of God (aka The Message) about the origin of Islam, and the message of prophet Mohammad. His subsequent television appearances were sporadic (among them Jesus of Nazareth).

In 1982 he starred in The Lion of the Desert movie, together with Irene Papas, Oliver Reed, Rod Steiger and John Gielgud. It was about the real-life Bedouin leader Omar Mukhtar (Quinn) who fought Mussolini's Italian troops in the deserts of Libya. The movie (which was produced and directed by late Moustapha Akkad) is now critically acclaimed after initially receiving negative publicity in the West for being partially funded by Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi, thus its relatively poor performance at the box office. In 1983 he revisited his most famous characterization when he played in a successful revival of Kander and Ebb's musical version of Zorba, which ran at the Broadway Theatre in New York for 362 performances.

In 1994, he became a semi-regular guest (playing Zeus) on the syndicated Hercules series. Though his film career slowed considerably during the 1990s, Quinn continued to work steadily, appearing in films as diverse as Jungle Fever (1991), Last Action Hero (1993), and A Walk in the Clouds (1995).

Shortly after completing his final film role in Avenging Angelo (2001), Anthony Quinn died of pneumonia and respiratory failure while suffering from terminal throat cancer at the age of 86 in Boston, Massachusetts. He lived out the twilight of his life in Bristol, Rhode Island and is buried there today in a family cemetery plot. His funeral service was held in a Baptist church; he had come to belong to the Four Square evangelical Christian community.

Preceded by:
Karl Malden
for A Streetcar Named Desire Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
1952
for Viva Zapata! Succeeded by:
Frank Sinatra
for From Here to Eternity
Preceded by:
Jack Lemmon
for Mister Roberts Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
1956
for Lust for Life Succeeded by:
Red Buttons
for Sayonara


[edit] Trivia
Quinn is the first Mexican-born actor to win an Academy Award. He won for Best Supporting Actor, in 1952, for Viva Zapata. He would win the award again in the same category for Lust for Life in 1956.

For an apprearance on The Tonight Show hosted by Jay Leno, the show's orchestra played Syrtaki aka "Zorba's Dance", the theme from Zorba the Greek. As he entered, Quinn danced a few steps of the dance, to huge applause. But when seated, Quinn remarked, "I hate that song! Everywhere I go, they play that song!"


[edit] Family
Quinn proved as volatile and passionate as his screen persona in his personal life. He divorced his wife Katherine (Cecil B. DeMille's adopted daughter), with whom he had three children, in 1956. The following year he embarked on a tempestuous thirty-one-year marriage to costume designer Iolanda Quinn. The union crumbled in 1993 when Quinn had an affair with his secretary that resulted in a baby; the two shared a second child in 1996. In total, Quinn fathered thirteen children, among them Alex A. Quinn, Francesco Quinn, Lorenzo Quinn, Valentina Quinn, and Sean Quinn, who is a real estate agent in New Jersey. Anthony Quinn had three known mistresses.


[edit] Painting and writing
Quinn was a friend and student of Frank Lloyd Wright; it was while Quinn was studying art and architecture at Taliesin that he was drawn to acting, and Wright encouraged this career move. In his free time, when he wasn't acting, Quinn continued to paint and became a well-known artist.

Anthony Quinn wrote and co-wrote two memoirs, The Original Sin (1972) and One Man Tango (1997). In the latter, Quinn is candid and apologetic about some of his past's darker moments.


[edit] Quotes
"In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum."
"I never get the girl. I wind up with a country instead."

[edit] External links
Anthony Quinn at the Internet Movie Database
http://www.beckerfilms.com/quinn.html

Birth and early life
He was born Humphrey DeForest Bogart in New York City, the oldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart and Maud Humphrey; he had English and distant Dutch ancestry.[1] His father was a Republican and a Presbyterian, while his mother was a Tory and an Episcopalian; Bogart was raised in his mother's Episcopal church.[2] He is one of the descendents of King Edward III of England. [3]

Bogart's birthday has been a subject of controversy. It was long believed that his birthday on Christmas Day, 1899, was a Warner Bros. fiction created to romanticise his background, and that he was really born on January 23, 1899, a date that appears in many references. However, this story is now considered baseless: although no birth certificate has ever been found, his birth notice did appear in a Boston newspaper in early January 1900, which supports the December 1899 date.

In addition, the 1900 census for the household of Belmont Bogart lists his son Humphrey as having a birthdate in December of 1899. His last wife, actress Lauren Bacall, always maintained that December 25 was his true birth date.


[edit] Childhood
Bogart's father, Belmont, was a successful surgeon. His mother, Maud Humphrey, was a very successful commercial illustrator. Indeed, she used a drawing of baby Humphrey in a well-known ad campaign for Mellins Baby Food. In her prime, she made over $50,000 a year as an illustrator, then a vast sum. The Bogarts lived in a fashionable Upper West Side apartment, and had a cottage in upstate New York.

"I can't say I ever loved my mother," Bogart once said. "I admired her." He was raised mainly by an Irish nurse. "My parents fought," he said another time. "We kids would pull the covers over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of propriety."

From his father, Bogart inherited a tendency for needling people, a fondness for fishing and a life-long love of sailing. Humphrey was the oldest child of three. When Bogart fell in love with Lauren Bacall and she introduced him to her large family, he said, "Christ, you've got more goddamn relatives than I've ever seen."

As a boy, Bogart was teased for his curls, his tidiness, the "cute" pictures his mother had him pose for, the Little Lord Fauntleroy clothes she dressed him in—and the name "Humphrey." He was also teased for his lisp; caused by an accident in which a splinter became embedded in his lower lip. "Goddamn doctor," Bogart later told David Niven, "instead of stitching it up, he screwed it up."


[edit] School
The Bogarts sent their son to the Trinity School in New York and then to the prestigious preparatory school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. They hoped he would go on to Yale, but in 1918, Bogart was expelled from Phillips Academy. [1]The details of his expulsion are disputed.

One story says that he was expelled for throwing the headmaster into Rabbit Pond, a man-made lake located behind the Andover Inn, while others say it was for smoking and drinking. His study habits were erratic and his grades were low, and he may have hastened his departure with some intemperate comments to the staff. He had a lifelong dislike of authority figures.


[edit] Early career in the theatre
Bogart took odd jobs, joined the Naval Reserve, and eventually drifted into acting. While in the Navy, he was injured which resulted in his trademark snarl and unique speaking voice[1]. He liked the late hours that actors kept, and enjoyed the attention that an actor got on stage. Most of all, he enjoyed the challenge of putting on a difficult scene, making the audience believe it. He dug deeply into the characters he portrayed, and found them a welcome escape from his own self.

Bogart began his acting career on the Brooklyn stage in 1921, playing a Japanese butler. He never took acting lessons, and had no formal training. An early reviewer wrote of Bogart's work: "To be as kind as possible, we will only say that this actor was inadequate." Bogart loathed the trivial parts he had to play early in his career, calling them "White Pants Willie" roles.

Bogart appeared in 21 Broadway productions between 1922 and 1935. He played juveniles or romantic second-leads in drawing room comedies. He is said to have been the first actor to say "Tennis, anyone?" on stage.

Early in his career, Bogart met his first wife, Helen Menken. They married in 1926, divorced in 1927, and remained friends. In 1928, he married his second wife, Mary Philips. Philips, like Menken, had a fiery temper, and once bit the finger of a policeman who tried to arrest her for drunkenness.

Spencer Tracy was a serious Broadway actor whom Bogart liked and admired, and they became good friends. It was Spencer Tracy, in 1930, who first called him "Bogie."


[edit] The Petrified Forest
In 1934, Bogart starred in the play Invitation to a Murder. The producer Arthur Hopkins saw the play and sent for Bogart when he chose to produce Robert E. Sherwood's new play, The Petrified Forest. Bogart arrived in Hopkins' office while Sherwood was there; Hopkins told him: "I've got a good role for you. A gangster role." Robert Sherwood was sure Hopkins was wrong; Bogart should play the football player. Bogart said later: "They argued back and forth, and I thought Sherwood was right. I couldn't picture myself playing a gangster. So what happened? I made a hit as the gangster."

The Petrified Forest had 197 performances in New York; Bogart played escaped killer Duke Mantee. Leslie Howard, who played the lead, knew how crucial Bogart was to the success of the play. He and Bogart became friends, and he promised to help Bogart reprise his role if Hollywood made the play into a film.

Bogart was proud of his success as an actor, but the fact that it came from playing a gangster weighed on him. He once said, "I can't get in a mild discussion without turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of voice, or this arrogant face—something that antagonizes everybody. Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that's why I'm cast as the heavy."

Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to The Petrified Forest, signed up Leslie Howard, then tested several Hollywood veterans for the Duke Mantee role, and chose Edward G. Robinson. Bogart cabled news of this to Howard, who was in Scotland. Leslie Howard insisted that Bogart play Duke Mantee. When Warner Bros. saw that Howard would not budge, they gave in. Bogart never forgot this, and named his only daughter Leslie Howard Bogart.


[edit] Early film career
Robert E. Sherwood remained a close friend of Bogart's. In 1936, the film version of The Petrified Forest came out. Bogart got excellent reviews. Still, he was now stuck in a series of crime dramas for Warner Bros. and cast as a heavy. All told, in his career as a tough guy, Bogart went to the electric chair 12 times, and got over 800 years of hard labor. Jack Warner saw nothing wrong with that; as long as the movies made money, and the actors got paid, he saw no reason for anyone to complain.

Mary Philips refused to give up her Broadway career to come to Hollywood with Bogart, and soon they were divorced.

On August 21, 1938, Bogart made a disastrous third marriage, which only heightened his frustration. His third wife was Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober, but a paranoid drunk. She was convinced that her husband was cheating on her. The more she and Bogart drifted apart, the more she drank, got furious and threw things at him: plants, crockery, anything close at hand. Bogart sometimes returned fire, and the press dubbed them "the Battling Bogarts." "The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to the Civil War," said their friend Julius Epstein. Another wag observed that there was madness in his Methot. During his marriage to Mayo Methot, Bogart bought a sailboat, which he called "Sluggy" after his hot-tempered wife.

In 1938, Warner Bros. put him in a "hillbilly musical" called Swing Your Lady as a wrestling promoter;he later apparently considered this his worst film performance. In 1939, Bogart played a mad scientist in The Return of Doctor X. He cracked: "If it'd been Jack Warner's blood...I wouldn't have minded so much. The trouble was they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie."

The studio system, then in its heyday, largely restricted actors to one studio, and Warner Bros. had no interest in making Bogart a star. Shooting on a new movie might begin days or only hours after shooting on the last movie was complete. Any actor who refused a role could be suspended without pay. Bogart didn't like the roles chosen for him, but he worked steadily: between 1936 and 1940, Bogart averaged a new movie every two months. He thought that Warner Bros. were cheap in their wardrobe department, and often wore his own suits in his movies. In High Sierra, Bogart used his own mutt to play his character's dog "Pard."

The leading men ahead of Bogart at Warner Bros. included not just such classic stars as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, but also actors far less well-known today, such as Victor McLaglen, George Raft and Paul Muni. Most of the better movie scripts the studio bought went to these men, and Bogart had to take what was left. He made films like Racket Busters, San Quentin, and You Can't Get Away With Murder. The only substantial leading role he ever got during this period was in Samuel Goldwyn's Dead End (1937), but he played a variety of interesting supporting roles in films featuring the bigger stars, such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) (another picture in which he got shot by James Cagney). Bogart was gunned down on film repeatedly, by Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, among others; he rarely saw his own films and didn't attend the premieres.

Bogart had been raised to believe that acting was something beneath a gentleman. Acting in movies was even worse than on the stage, and playing depraved gunmen in "B" pictures for Warner Bros. was not something to be mentioned in polite company.

In California, in the 1930s, Bogart bought a 55-foot sailing yacht from Dick Powell. The sea was his sanctuary. He was a serious sailor, respected by other sailors who had seen too many Hollywood actors and their boats. About 30 weekends a year, he went out on his boat. He once said: "An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be."

He had a lifelong disgust for the pretentious, fake or phony. Sensitive yet caustic, and disgusted by the inferior movies he was churning out, Bogart cultivated the persona of a soured idealist, a man exiled from better things in New York, living by his wits, drinking too much, cursed to live out his life among second-rate people and projects.

When he thought an actor, director or a movie studio had done something shoddy, he spoke up about it, and was willing to be quoted. The Hollywood press, unaccustomed to candor, was delighted. Bogart once said, "All over Hollywood, they are continually advising me 'Oh, you mustn't say that. That will get you in a lot of trouble' when I remark that some picture or writer or director or producer is no good. I don't get it. If he isn't any good, why can't you say so? If more people would mention it, pretty soon it might start having some effect."


[edit] Rise to stardom

[edit] High Sierra
High Sierra, a 1941 movie directed by Raoul Walsh, was written by Bogart's friend and drinking partner, John Huston. The film was a step forward for Bogart. He still played the villain, "Mad Dog" Roy Earle, and he still died at the end, but at least he got to kiss Ida Lupino and play a character with some depth. In a climactic scene, Bogart's character slid 90 feet down a mountainside to his just reward. His stunt double, Buster Wiles, bounced a few times going down the mountain and wanted another take to do better. "Forget it," said Raoul Walsh. "It's good enough for the 25-cent customers."

Bogart and Huston enjoyed each other's company, and drew on each other's gifts. Bogart had always been self-conscious about his height (5'8"); Huston was 6'2" (and his rail-thin build made him appear to be even taller). Bogart had never been close to his father, while Huston was very close to his, actor Walter Huston.

Bogart admired and somewhat envied Huston for his skill as a writer. Though a poor student, Bogart was a lifelong reader. He could quote Plato, Pope, Ralph Waldo Emerson and over a thousand lines of Shakespeare. He admired writers, and some of his best friends were screenwriters, including Louis Bromfield, Nathaniel Benchley and Nunnally Johnson. Through Thomas Dudley, Bogart was related to playwrights Tennessee Williams and Robert E. Sherwood, as well as George Washington and John Brown.

John Huston reported being easily bored, and admired Bogart not just for his acting talent but for his intense concentration.


[edit] The Maltese Falcon
James Cagney and George Raft had both turned down Bogart's part in High Sierra; Raft didn't want to play a character who died at the end. Then George Raft turned down the male lead in John Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941) because this was simply a cleaned up version of the pre-code version of The Maltese Falcon and his contract stipulated that he did not have to appear in remakes.

Bogart grabbed the part and audiences saw him play a leading role with real complexity. His character, Sam Spade, was still capable of duplicity and violence, but he was a leading man: handsome, smart, fated to survive. When he discovered his sexy client was a murderess, he turned her in, with a speech he made famous: "I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. I hope they don't hang you by your sweet neck. If you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years and you'll come back to me. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."


In Casablanca, "Everybody comes to Rick's."
[edit] Casablanca
Bogart got his first real romantic lead in Casablanca, playing Rick Blaine, the nightclub owner.

In real life, Bogart himself played tournament chess, one level below master level. It was reportedly his idea that Rick Blaine be portrayed as a chess player.

Off the set, Ingrid Bergman and Bogart hardly spoke during the filming of Casablanca. She said later, "I kissed him but I never knew him." Years later, after Bergman had taken up with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and bore him a child, Bogart confronted her. "You used to be a great star," he said. "What are you now?" "A happy woman," she replied.

Casablanca won the 1943 Academy Award for Best Picture. Bogart was nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role, but lost out to Paul Lukas for his performance in Watch on the Rhine.


[edit] Bogart and Bacall

Bogart and Bacall interviewed during World War II.Only Bogart's fourth marriage, to Lauren Bacall ("Baby"), was a happy one. They met while filming To Have and Have Not. The director, Howard Hawks, once commented: "When two people are falling in love with each other, they're not tough to get along with, I can tell you that. Bogie was marvelous. I said, "You've got to help," and of course after a few days he really began to get interested in the girl. That made him help more." Of Bacall, Hawks said: "She had to keep practicing for six to eight months to keep that low voice. Now, it's perfectly natural. And the funny thing is that Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so she had to keep playing it the rest of her life."

They were married on May 21, 1945 in Mansfield, Ohio, at Malabar Farm, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, who was a close friend of Bogart's. The wedding was held in the Big House.

Bogart and Bacall's relationship is at the heart of the film noir masterpiece The Big Sleep. Chandler thoroughly admired Bogart's performance: "Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt."

Bacall allowed Bogart lots of weekend time on his boat. She got seasick, and Bogart said, "The trouble with having dames on board is you can't pee over the side." Bogart would frequently sail to Catalina with friends or set some lobster traps.

Bacall wrote of Bogart: "You had to stay awake married to him. Every time I thought I could relax and do everything I wanted, he'd buck. There was no way to predict his reactions, no matter how well I knew him."

Bogart and Bacall moved into a $160,000 white brick mansion in Holmby Hills, an exclusive neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. Bogart and Bacall had two Jaguar cars, and three blooded Boxer dogs. Bogart said "We moved where all the creeps live." But he liked some of his neighbors, especially Judy Garland.

Lauren Bacall gave birth to a son, Stephen, making Bogart a father at 49. He had had months to absorb the news and had even had his own baby shower. (Frank Sinatra brought him baby rattles.) But Bogart still felt awkward about being a father. ("What do you do with a kid?" he asked a friend. "They don't drink.") In 1952, they had their second child, Leslie (a girl named after British actor Leslie Howard, who had been killed in WWII).


[edit] Bogart parties
Some information in this article or section has not been verified and may not be reliable.
Please check for any inaccuracies, and modify and cite sources as needed.
There are many tales from the 1950s about Bogart in bars and clubs. One night at the famous Beverly Hills restaurant Chasen's, Bogart and Peter Lorre grabbed an enormous safe belonging to the restaurant, rolled it out the door and left it sitting in the middle of Beverly Boulevard.


[edit] The panda case
In 1950, Bogart and his friend Bill Seeman arrived at the El Morocco Club in New York after midnight. Bogart had bought two giant stuffed panda bears for Stephen, and the two men introduced the bears around as their "dates", then demanded a table for four. They propped up the bears in separate chairs, and began to drink.

Two young women at the club saw the pandas, and one of the women picked up one of the pandas. Bogart got angry and pushed her. After she fell to the floor, the other woman picked up the other panda, Bogart said something cruel, and her boyfriend arrived and began throwing plates. After a wild scuffle, Bogart, Seeman and the pandas were thrown out of El Morocco, and told never to return.

One of the women sued Bogart for $25,000. He showed up in court and was asked: "Were you drunk?" "Isn't everybody at three in the morning?" he replied. The case was dropped. Later, he mused: "Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left who do any good old hell-raising."


[edit] Stories from Romanoff's
Bogart loved to go to Romanoff's in Beverly Hills. A valet took the Jaguar, and a maitre d' led Bogart to his regular booth. Friends stopped by to chat or talk shop: David Niven, Judy Garland, Richard Brooks, Marilyn Monroe, Swifty Lazar, Spencer Tracy. Rock Hudson was a rising star; when he saw him, Bogart asked, "What the hell kind of name is 'Rock' Hudson?"

Bogart considered restauranteur Mike Romanoff a poseur, but counted him a close friend nonetheless. Bogart admired him as a chess player among other things, and appreciated his tendency to needle people. Mike Romanoff was a man with a cultivated Oxford accent, who insisted that his true name was "Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitri Obolensky Romanoff", and that he was a blood nephew of the former Russian tsar.

Bogart himself was a chess player of at least expert strength. Some suggest that his academic failure may have been linked to the attentions he was giving to the game. In his first appearance in Casablanca he is alone, studying a chessboard. During the late 20s and early 30s, when the Depression was beginning to bite, he spent much time taking on all-comers for small stake chess games in New York City. He would play at Time Square, Coney Island and downtown Manhattan for nickels, dimes or sometimes as much as 50 cents a game. In later life he qualified as a tournament director and controlled at some Californian events.


Romanoff would greet Bogart by saying, "Good afternoon, Mr. Bogart. Are you going to be paying your bill today? I thought that might be a pleasant change."

Bogart would smile and reply: "Are you going to be putting any alcohol in your drinks today? That might be a pleasant change." If Bacall was with Bogart, Romanoff might turn to her and say: "I see that you are still dating the same aging actor."


[edit] Later career
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Between 1943 and 1951 Bogart starred in many other films including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Key Largo (1948).


[edit] The African Queen

Bogart in the The African Queen.In 1951, Bogart starred in the movie The African Queen, with Katharine Hepburn, again directed by his friend John Huston. It was a difficult shoot, on location in Africa and just about everyone in the cast came down with dysentery except Bogart and John Huston. Bogart explained: "I built a solid wall of scotch between me and the bugs. If a mosquito bit me, he'd fall over dead drunk."

One day during the African Queen shoot, the eponymous boat even sank (Lauren Bacall recalled: "The natives had been told to watch it and they did—they watched it sink").

John Huston recalled:

"Bogie didn't particularly care for the Charlie Alnutt role when he started, but I slowly got him into it, showing him by expression and gesture what I thought Alnutt should be like. He first imitated me, then all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man. He realized he was on to something new and good. He said to me, 'John, don't let me lose it.'"
Hepburn's proper spinster character scolded Bogart's Charlie Alnutt: "Nature, Mr. Alnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above." Bogart had a famous put down too: "You crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid!"

The role of Charlie Alnutt won Bogart his first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1951. He had vowed to friends that if he won, his speech would break the convention of thanking everyone in sight. He would say instead: "I don't owe anything to anyone! I earned this award by hard work and paying attention to my craft." But when Bogart won the Academy Award, he thanked John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, and the cast and crew.

Also in 1951, Bogart and Bacall co-starred in the syndicated radio drama Bold Venture, for which he was paid a reported $4,000 a week. He played a character very much like Steve in To Have and Have Not, and she played his "ward". He called her "Sailor".

Bogart organized a delegation to Washington, D.C., during the height of McCarthyism, against the House Unamerican Activities Committee's harassment of Hollywood writers and actors.


[edit] Final roles
He dropped his asking price to get the role of Captain Queeg in Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny, then griped with some of his old bitterness about it. ("This never happens to Cooper or Grant or Gable, but always to me. Why does it happen to me?")

Bogart gave a bravura performance as Captain Queeg, in many ways an extension of the character he had played in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and The Big Sleep—the wary loner who trusts no one—but with none of the warmth or humor that made those characters so appealing. Like his portrayal of Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bogart played a paranoid, self-pitying character whose small-mindedness eventually destroyed him.

Sabrina (dir. Billy Wilder) and The Barefoot Contessa (dir. Joseph Mankiewicz) in 1954 gave him two of his subtlest roles.


Bogart appeared in The Left Hand of God (1955) shortly before his death.In 1955, he made three films: We're No Angels (dir. Michael Curtiz), The Left Hand of God (dir. Edward Dmytryk) and The Desperate Hours (dir. William Wyler).

Mark Robson's The Harder They Fall was his last film.


[edit] Death
By the late 1950s, Bogart's health was failing. Once, after signing a long-term deal with Warner Bros., Bogart predicted with glee that his teeth and hair would fall out before the contract ended. That sent a fuming Jack Warner to his lawyers.

Bogart contracted cancer of the esophagus. He almost never spoke of it and refused to see a doctor until January of 1956, and by then removal of his esophagus, two lymph nodes and a rib was too little, too late.

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy came to see him. Bogart was too weak to walk up and down stairs. He tried to joke about it: "Put me in the dumbwaiter and I'll ride down to the first floor in style."

Hepburn has described the last time she and Spencer Tracy saw Bogart: "Spence patted him on the shoulder and said, 'Goodnight, Bogie.' Bogie turned his eyes to Spence very quietly and with a sweet smile covered Spence's hand with his own and said, 'Goodbye, Spence.' Spence's heart stood still. He understood."

Bogart had just turned 57 and weighed only 80 pounds (36 kg) when he died on January 14, 1957 after falling into a coma. He died in Hollywood. His funeral was held at All Saints Episcopal Church with musical selections played from Bogart's favorite composers, Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy. Bacall had asked Spencer Tracy to give the eulogy but Tracy was too upset. John Huston gave the eulogy instead, and reminded the gathered mourners that while Bogart's life had ended far too soon, it had been a rich one. Huston said: "He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him."

Huston also noted of Bogart:

"Himself, he never took too seriously—his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with an amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect...In each of the fountains at Versailles there is a pike which keeps all the carp active; otherwise they would grow overfat and die. Bogie took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood. Yet his victims seldom bore him any malice, and when they did, not for long. His shafts were fashioned only to stick into the outer layer of complacency, and not to penetrate through to the regions of the spirit where real injuries are done."
Katharine Hepburn said:

"He was one of the biggest guys I ever met. He walked straight down the center of the road. No maybes. Yes or no. He liked to drink. He drank. He liked to sail a boat. He sailed a boat. He was an actor. He was happy and proud to be an actor. He'd say to me, 'Are you comfortable? Everything okay?' He was looking out for me."
His cremated remains are interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, California. Buried with him is a small gold whistle, which he had given to his future wife, Lauren Bacall, before they married. In reference to their first movie together, it was inscribed: "If you want anything, just whistle."

Humphrey Bogart's hand and foot prints are immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6322 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.

After his death, the "Bogie Cult" formed at the Brattle Theatre which contributed to his spike in popularity in the late 50's and 60's.


[edit] Quotes

[edit] Attributed
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Humphrey Bogart"I can't say I ever loved my mother, I admired her."
"My parents fought. We kids would pull the covers over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of propriety."
"I don't approve of the John Waynes and the Gary Coopers saying 'Shucks, I ain't no actor—I'm just a bridge builder or a gas station attendant.' If they aren't actors, what the hell are they getting paid for? I have respect for my profession. I worked hard at it."
"The whole world is three drinks behind."
His last words were, "I never should have switched from scotch to martinis."

[edit] Famous movie quotes

[edit] Casablanca
"I stick my neck out for nobody."
"There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade." [to Major Strasser]
"You played it for her, you can play it for me! . . . If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"
"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
"Here's looking at you, kid."
"Tell me, who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo, or were there others in between? Or — aren't you the kind that tells?"
"Don't you sometimes wonder if it's worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for."
"If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon; and for the rest of your life."
"I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world. Someday you'll understand that."
"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"We'll always have Paris."

[edit] The Maltese Falcon
"The stuff that dreams are made of." [about the falcon]
"When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it." [to Peter Lorre]

[edit] The Big Sleep
"Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains!"
"What do you want me to do -- count three like they do in the movies?" [to a sadistic villain he's about to shoot]

[edit] Films
For a list of all Bogart's films see Humphrey Bogart filmography.

Preceded by:
José Ferrer
for Cyrano de Bergerac Academy Award for Best Actor
1951
for The African Queen Succeeded by:
Gary Cooper
for High Noon


[edit] Popular culture references
Bogart's distinctive manner of speech has made him the target of many a would-be impersonator.

The cartoon character Bogey Orangutan from the television series Shirt Tales was based on the voice and mannerisms of Humphrey Bogart.

In the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles motion picture, Michaelangelo attempts a Humphrey Bogart impression when he and the other Turtles are dining with April O'Neil.

Amongst many marijuana smokers, "Bogarting" refers to the act of retaining the marijuana cigarette (or "joint") for an abnormally long time, instead of passing it on to one's successor in the circle. The term is no doubt derived from the long and slow inhalations with which Bogart sometimes smoked his cigarettes. "Don't Bogart Me", a song by The Fraternity of Man, and "Don't Bogart that Joint", a song by Little Feat, both employ this use of the term.

In the PC video game Max Payne, one of the chapters is called "Playing it Bogart". This is a reference to one of Max' quotes: "I walked straight in, playing it Bogart".

In the Woody Allen movie Play it Again, Sam (1972), Humphrey gives advice to Woody about his problems with women. "Play it Again, Sam" is also the non-existent quote, famously misattributed to the movie Casablanca.

In the Victoria Wood TV show Dinnerladies, Julie Walters's character talks about Lauren Bacall, saying that she is one of the few people who can "in the glare of the world's press, I picked my Bogie", referring to her relationship with Bogart and his nickname.

In a Duck Dodgers episode "To Love A Duck", Duck Dodgers says to the Martian Queen, "We will always have Paris," which is said first by Humphrey Bogart.

In Fort Minor Song Spraypaint & Ink Pens (2006), Shinoda says, "Play it cool like Humphrey Bogart"

Issue #70 of the US The Phantom comic book is known as the "Bogart" issue, as the story stars Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Claude Rains and is a mixture of Casablanca, The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Two Bugs Bunny cartoons featured Humphrey Bogart:

Bogart is a customer in a Hollywood restaurant who gets hit in the face with a banana cream pie by Elmer Fudd.
Bugs decides to take a baby penguin back to the South Pole; at intervals, "Fred C. Dobbs" {Bogart's character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre} appears and asks Bugs to "help a poor American down on his luck." At the end, when Bugs finds out that the penguin is part of an ice skating troupe-and he didn't have to go to the South Pole-Dobbs shows up once again. Bugs uses Dobbs' own words and gives Dobbs the penguin before running away screaming!
Bryan Ferry penned the song 2HB (To Humphrey Bogart) for Roxy Music's eponymous 1972 debut album. Bogart was an idol of Ferry's.

In V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, which portrays poor people who inhabit a section of Port of Spain and fantasize about a better life, there is mentioned a character named Bogart, who had called himself Patience until the film Casablanca reached Trinidad. This Bogart cultivates an American accent and gives chocolates to children (see [4]).

In the episode "Lines in the Sand" of the TV series House, Dr. House recites Bogart's famous speech from Casablanca ("You'll regret it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for the rest of your life.") to a 17-year-old girl infatuated with him.


[edit] See also
Bogart-Bacall syndrome

[edit] References
^ David Wallechinsky & Amy Wallace: The New Book of Lists, p. 9. Canongate, 2005. ISBN 1-84195-719-4.
Halliwell's Film, Video and DVD Guide (2004), Leslie Halliwell, HarperCollins Entertainment, ISBN 0-00-719081-6
"Time Out" Film Guide (2004), John Pym (ed), Time Out Group Ltd, ISBN 1-904978-21-5
"Time Magazine" (June 7, 1954) cover story on Humphrey Bogart
By Myself (1979) Lauren Bacall, Alfred Knopf, ISBN 0-394-41308-3
Bogart: In Search of My Father (1995) Stephen Humphrey Bogart, Dutton, ISBN 0-525-93987-3
The Making of the African Queen (1987) Katharine Hepburn, Alfred Knopf, ISBN 0-394-56272-0

[edit] Further reading
The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years (1899-1931) (2003), Darwin Porter, Georgia Literary Association, ISBN 0-9668030-5-1
Bogart: A Life in Hollywood (1997), Jeffrey Meyers, Andre Deutsch Ltd, ISBN 0-233-99144-1

[edit] External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Humphrey BogartHumphrey Bogart at the Internet Movie Database
Modern Drunkard: Three Drinks Ahead With Humphrey Bogart
The TFL-approved Humphrey Bogart fanlisting
caricature of Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart at the Internet Broadway Database
Humphrey Bogart at ChessGames.com




[edit] Video
Documentary 42': Humphrey Bogart... Behind the Legend

Elia Kazan (Kazanjoglous) was born in Constantinople, Turkey, on 7th September, 1909. Four years later the Kazan family moved to the United States. Kazan attended Williams College in Massachusetts before studying at the Drama School at Yale University.

In 1932 Kazan joined the Group Theatre in New York led by Lee Strasberg. Members of the group tended to hold left-wing political views and wanted to produce plays that dealt with important social issues. Those involved in the group included John Garfield, Howard Da Silva, John Randolph, Joseph Bromberg and Lee J. Cobb.

Kazan joined the American Communist Party in 1934 and the following year appeared in Waiting for Lefty, a play by a fellow party member, Clifford Odets. Kazan also appeared as an actor in two movies: City for Conquest (1940) and Blues in the Night (1941).

In 1947 Kazan, Robert Lewis, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford established the Actors Studio, where they pioneered the idea of Method Acting (a system of training and rehearsal for actors which bases a performance upon inner emotional experience).

Kazan directed several two plays on Broadway by Arthur Miller: All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). He also worked with Tennessee Williams on the Pulitzer Prize winning, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Kazan also became interested in movies and directed three films that dealt with social issues: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Gentlemen's Agreement (1947) and Pinky (1949).

In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. In September 1947, the HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named several people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

Ten of those named: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions put by the HUAC. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The HUAC and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.

Kazan was known for his left-wing views and he was eventually called to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Controversially, Kazan decided to name eight people who had been fellow members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s. As a result, these people were called before the HUAC. Those that refused to name names, were blacklisted. Kazan later claimed he felt no guilty about what he had done: "There's a normal sadness about hurting political, but I's rather hurt them a little than hurt myself a lot."

As a reward for his co-operation, Kazan was allowed to continue working in Hollywood. On the Waterfront (1954), was an attempt to justify the morality of providing information on friends to people in authority. Budd Schulberg, the writer and the actor Lee J. Cobb, who both testified before the HUAC, also worked on the film. Other movies directed by Kazan during this period included East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956) and Splendor in the Grass (1960). Kazan won the Academy Award as best director for two of his films: Gentleman's Agreement and On the Waterfront.

Kazan also wrote several novels including America, America (1962), The Arrangement (1967), The Assassins (1972) and The Understudy (1974). In his autobiography, A Life (1988), Kazan attempted to defend his decision to give names of his former friends to the House of Un-American Activities Committee. One critic has described it as "maybe the best show business autobiography of the century."

Elia Kazan, who was married three times (Molly Thatcher, Barbara Loden and Frances Rudge), died on 28th September, 2003.






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(1) In his autobiography Timebends, Arthur Miller describes being told by Elia Kazan about his intention to testify to the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

Listening to him I grew frightened. There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying: unless he came clean he could never hope, in the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America, and he would probably not be given a passport to work abroad either. If the theatre remained open to him, it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay, and he had been told in so many words by his old boss and friend Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the Committee.

I could only say that I thought this would pass and that it had to pass because it would devour the glue that kept the country together if left to its own unobstructed course. I said that it was not the Reds who were dispensing our fears now, but the other side, and it could not go indefinitely, it would someday wear down the national nerve. And then there might be regrets about this time. But I was growing cooler with the thought that as unbelievable as it seemed, I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I attended meetings of the Communist Party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them.



(2) When he appeared before the House of Un-American Activities Committee on 12th April, 1952, Elia Kazan explained how the American Communist Party had attempted to take over the Group Theatre in the 1930s.

I was instructed by the Communist unit to demand that the group be run "democratically." This was a characteristic Communist tactic; they were not interested in democracy; they wanted control. They had no chance of controlling the directors, but they thought that if authority went to the actors, they would have a chance to dominate through the usual tricks of behind-the-scenes caucuses, block voting, and confusion of issues. This was the specific issue on which I quit the Party. I had enough regimentation, enough of being told what to think and say and do, enough of their habitual violation of the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. The last straw came when I was invited to go through a typical Communist scene of crawling and apologizing and admitting the error of my ways. I had had a taste of police-state living and I did not like it.



(3) Elia Kazan, statement, New York Times (13th April, 1952)

In the past weeks intolerable rumors about my political position have been circulating in New York and Hollywood. I want to make my stand clear:

I believe that Communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem. That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.

I believe that the American people can solve this problem wisely only if they have the facts about Communism. All the facts. Now, I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency.

Whatever hysteria exists - and there is some, particularly in Hollywood - is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it. The facts I have are sixteen years out of date, but they supply a small piece of background to the graver picture of Communism today. I have placed these facts before the House Committee on Un-American Activities without reserve and I now place them before the public and before my co-workers in motion pictures and in the theatre.

I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later. I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936 that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.

Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be resisted always. It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries.

I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies. I believe these things must be fought for wherever they are not fully honored and protected whenever they are threatened.



(4) Elia Kazan, was interviewed by Edwin Newman on the television programme, Speaking Freely, in 1972.

Edwin Newman: I suppose one of the things for which you were most criticized you appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and confessed that you had been briefly for eighteen months a Communist when you were young. And you named I think it was seven other people who had been Communists. A good many people thought you shouldn't have named any other names whatever you said about yourself. You have never over the years said much about that. Is there anything you want to say about it?

Elia Kazan: Well, not really. I think when it is understood from the point of 1972 it is one thing and when it is understood in the context of what was going on in 1952 and how we felt in 1952, it is another. We knew about a society that the left was idealizing then, the Russian society. We knew that it was a slave society. We had a good idea how many people were being killed. I've often wondered how some of the people who criticized me went through those years and stayed behind Russia, continued to idealize it when they knew what was happening. I've felt sad about it or bad about it, and I've sometimes felt - well, I would do the same thing over again. I think I spoke up not for any reason of money or security or anything else, but because I actually felt it. If I made a mistake, then that was a mistake that was honestly made.



(5) In his autobiography Elia Kazan described how Harold Clurman had influenced him.

I learned from Harold that a director's first task is to make his actors eager to play their parts. He had a unique way of talking to actors - I didn't have it and I never heard of another director who did; he turned them on with his intellect, his analyses and his insights. But also by his high spirits. Harold's work was joyous. He didn't hector his actors from an authoritarian position; he was a partner, not an overlord, in the struggle of production. He'd reveal to each actor at the onset a concept of his or her performance, one the actor could not have anticipated and could not have found on his own. Harold's visions were brilliant; actors were eager to realize them. They were also full of compassion for the characters' dilemmas, their failings and their aspirations.



(6) Elia Kazan, in conservation with is third wife, Frances Rudge (1987)

What I'm mad at nowadays is, for instance, mortality. I've passed 78 and have only recently found how to enjoy life. For one thing I've stopped worrying about what people think of me - or so I like to believe. I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me. Now I'm out of show business and I've become my true grumpy self.



(7) Roger Ebert, Chicago Sunday Times (29th September, 2003)

In the McCarthy era, the House Un-American Activities Committee held widely publicized hearings, asking Hollywood figures to name others they knew to be communists. When Mr. Kazan cooperated, he was shunned and scorned by many of his colleagues for the rest of his life.

Mr. Kazan was adamant that he had done the right thing. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life (1988), he said he had come to hate the party, which "should be driven . . . into the light of scrutiny." His action was taken, he said, "out of my own true self."

Those who refused to testify said the hearings were show trials, like those conducted by Stalin. They pointed out that Communist party membership was legal. A year after testifying, Mr. Kazan directed his greatest film, On the Waterfront, in which his hero Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) names names before a panel investigating labor practices.

The movie was written by Budd Schulberg, a writer who also named former communists, and the movie was seen by many as a response to their critics. Mr. Kazan said it wasn't. Whether it was or not, it is considered one of the greatest of all American films, was nominated for 11 Oscars and won seven, including best picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay and cinematography.




(8) David Thompson, The Guardian (29th September, 2003)

(In 1951) he (Kazan) heard that the House Committee on Un-American Activities wanted to talk to him. This was no surprise. The committee had been active since 1947, and Kazan was a very obvious target. There was a questioning session, early in 1952, at which he refused to name names. People in power in the picture business told him his career was in jeopardy. 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, and it was underlined in a piece written by his wife which they ran as an exculpatory ad in the New York Times. It was a moment of divide; many people would never talk to Kazan again - they pointed to his rising career, and to others that were crushed. They saw nastiness in the self-serving defence and predicted moral disaster for the man.


There were people who hadn't spoken to him in over 45 years; and who had crossed the street sometimes to avoid him. They had their reasons, good reasons; but everyone has his reasons. And the man is dead now, and his size cannot be denied any longer. Crossing the street will not do. Elia 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 film-maker 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.

There is no way his crammed career and conflicting impulses can be reduced to a short obituary. To list all his credits would take up the space, and leave no room for a proper account of his truly ugly face, made magnetic by the way his reproachful eyes watched you. 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, in addition to everything else he had done, he could have been a hypnotic actor or an inspiring political leader.




(9) The Times (29th September, 2003)

Inexplicably to colleagues in the film industry who had shared his ideals (like him many of them had been members of the Communist Party in the 1930s), Kazan was to commit what many still consider one of the great ideological betrayals in American performing arts history. In the early 1950s he informed the House Un-American Activities Committee, then engaged in a witch-hunt against communism, that he would do "anything you consider valuable or necessary to help".

He was always to defend his actions by claiming that as a liberal, he felt that the secrecy that aided communism posed a threat to the very existence of a free and democratic United States. (Lillian Hellman described this stance as "pious shit", and remained firmly of the opinion that Kazan was concerned only with saving his own creative skin.)

Be that as it may, Kazan's "help" to the committee included his naming of a number of prominent figures who either had, or had had, links with the Communist Party. All of these were blacklisted and most of them had their creative lives ruined as a result. Those who had careers blighted by Kazan's revelations - and the many more who came to grief because they were named by others - never forgave such a man as Kazan for his part in the betrayal. When, in 1999, it was decided to award Kazan an honorary Oscar for his lifetime of achievement, the announcement was greeted with repugnance in many quarters. At the ceremony, in March of that year, several members of the audience conspicuously refused to clap.



(10) The Telegraph (29th September, 2003)

In A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) Kazan turned on the emotional heat which was to give his films their pungent flavour. Having already directed Brando in the Broadway production, Kazan was able to intensify the atmosphere. The contrast between the brooding, instinctive Brando as Stanley Kowalski and the conventional histrionics of Vivien Leigh as Blanche gave the film its own tension.

Kazan worked again with Brando in Viva Zapata! (1952) and On the Waterfront (1954). These established him as a film-maker rather than an adapter of plays for the screen. By integrating the Method acting of Brando, Rod Steiger and Lee J Cobb with the location photography of the New York docks, On the Waterfront yielded some of the most powerfully realistic moments in American film history.

Brando won an Academy award for Waterfront; Kazan won the Oscar for best film, and was named best director; while Eva Marie Saint received the award for best supporting actress. What gave the film an added edge were its parallels between Brando's character as a docker tempted to sneak on his fellow trades unionists and Kazan's own recent evidence to the House of Un-American Activities Committee about former Communist comrades in the theatre.



(11) Andrew Gumbel, The Independent (29th September, 2003)

There are those who can never forgive Elia Kazan, one of the towering figures of 20th-century American film and theatre, for naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the McCarthy era in 1952.

But as tributes flowed in yesterday, following his death at the age of 94, the director who discovered Marlon Brando and James Dean and showcased the best of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams at last achieved a kind of peace.

Actors and colleagues hailed him as one of the seminal figures in American drama, a director who could bring the most intense passions out of his actors - he was a co-founder of the Actors Studio. He was also remembered as someone who could make intense social dramas, among them East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, positively sizzle on the screen.


Kazan never apologised for his testimony, in which he denounced eight actors and writers, including the playwright Clifford Odets and the actress Paula Strasberg, as members of the Communist Party. In fact, he took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times justifying his act.



(12) Mervyn Rothstein, New York Times (29th September, 2003)

To many critics, he was the best director of American actors in stage and screen history, discovering Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty and redefining the craft of film acting. In 1953 the critic Eric Bentley wrote that "the work of Elia Kazan means more to the American theater than that of any current writer."

In Hollywood, seven of Kazan's films won a total of 20 Academy Awards. He won best-director Oscars for "Gentleman's Agreement," a 1947 indictment of anti-Semitism, and "On the Waterfront" in 1954. "On the Waterfront," a searing depiction of venality and corruption on the New Jersey docks, won eight Oscars. Kazan also received an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999.

The lifetime-achievement award was controversial because in 1952 Kazan angered many of his friends and colleagues when he acknowledged before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936 and gave the committee the names of eight other party members. He had previously refused to do so, and his naming of names prompted many people in the arts, including those who had never been Communists, to excoriate him for decades.



(13) Warren Beatty, interview with the Los Angeles Times (29th September, 2003)

Elia Kazan was my first teacher in movies, an indispensable mentor for me; inspiring, generous, unpretentious, pre-eminent in both the theatre and the movies. I am blessed to have had him as a friend.