By Ben Riley
Emmy Award-winning Actor Ben Gazzara, 81, died on Friday in New York City due to pancreatic cancer.
A New York native with Sicilian lineage, the veteran actor began his 60-year-long screen career on stage and went on to act in over 100 films and TV movies, winning an Emmy Award in 2002. The gravel-voice Gazzara had a strongly masculine aura, whose voice was once called by a writer as "saloon-cured."
Having found much fame on Broadway in the 1950's, starred in the TV series "Run for Your Life" in the 1960s and was known on the big screen for his work with independent filmmaker John Cassavetes. His death was confirmed by his attorney Jay I. Julien.
He won his Emmy for his supporting role as the love interest of an aging waitress essayed by Gena Rowlands in the 2002 HBO series "Hysterical Blindness." Gazzara also received an Emmy nomination for the 1985 TV movie "An Early Frost," where he and Rowlands played a middle-aged couple coping with the revelations of their gay son, dying of AIDs.
Peter Bogdanovich, who directed Gazzara in two films- "Saint Jack" and "They All Laughed," said in 1998 that his working relationship with Gazzara was the best he'd ever had with an actor. ""Benny has the conscience of an artist, which is a rare thing," Bogdanovich had told The Los Angeles Times.
Having worked at the Actors Studio, Gazzara was first spotted in 1953 when he essayed the role of a sadistic bullying cadet at a military academy in an off-Broadway production of Calder Willingham's "End as a Man," which later moved to Broadway, where Gazzara made his debut.
He made his movie debut in 1957 in "The Strange One," which was the film version of "End as a Man." He hit the big screen in 1959 in director Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder."
In the 1960's, Gazzara ruled the silver screen by playing a police detective opposite Chuck Connors' attorney in the ABC series "Arrest and Trial." From 1965 to 1968, he appeared in "Run for Your Life," the NBC adventure series about a successful attorney diagnosed with a terminal illness who decides to live his remaining life to the fullest.
Having received two Emmy Award nominations for the series, he told the New York Daily News in 1999, "I hated it. So predictable I could almost do the next show without reading the script."
On the day when he finished the last episode of "Run for Your Life," he ran into Cassavetes at the Universal Studios. Having had a passing acquaintance with the director from their days as struggling actors in NYC, Cassavetes told him they'd do a movie together. The result of this partnership was the 1970 flick "Husbands," a drama about three suburban New York City commuters- starring Gazzara, Cassavetes and Peter Falk- whose lives are impacted with the death of a middle-aged friend.
In 1976, Gazzara starred in Cassavetes' "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie," and in 1977 in "Opening Night." In 2005, Gazzara said in the Times Union of Albany, "John created a climate where you could do no wrong. He allowed you to surprise yourself while he talked around the characters and the action."
Rowlands, who was married to Cassavetes, told The Times in 1998, "John and Benny had a great artistic understanding, and I think Benny was relieved to find someone like John, who took things as seriously as he did."
In her statement referring to the deaths of Cassavetes in 1989, Falk in 2011, and now Gazzara, Rowlands said, "It breaks my heart to have this era come to an end. Ben meant so much to all of us. To our families. To John. To Peter. To have them gone now is devastating to me."
With Cassavetes' death, Gazzara went into a deep depression. Back then, he was living with wife Elke in Italy, where Gazzara made a number of films. He said about the time, "I fell in love with the lifestyle." He was married twice before, to actresses Louise Erickson and Janice Rule, with both relationships ending in divorce.
Gazzara wrote a book titled "In the Moment: My Life as an Actor" in 2004, where he described his constant womanizing and several affairs, including one with Audrey Hepburn, whom he worked with in "Bloodline" and "They All Laughed."
He met Elke in South Korea in 1979 while filming the Korean War film "Inchon," and she was producing a behind-the-scenes documentary. He told the New York Daily News in 1999, "Elke saved my life When I met her, I was drinking too much, fooling around too much, killing myself. She put romance and hope back in my life."
In 2006, he told Backstage, "Nobody ever knew what to do with me because I wasn't easily pigeonholed." Gazzara once told the San Fransisco Chronicle that he was never bitter when a coveted role went to someone else. He said, "I don't know why. Maybe my ego, my Sicilian pride. And I was never jealous of another actor, 'cause..I knew I had the goods."
Over his entire career, Gazzara periodically returned to the stage. In 1975, he was nominated for a Tony Award for "Hughie/Duet" and another nomination in 1977 for a revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Gazzara, the son of Sicilian immigrants, was born August 28, 1930, in New York City, into a family that struggled during the Depression. He is survived by his wife of 30 years- Elke; a daughter, Elizabeth; and a brother, Anthony.
