Kazan, Elia

Kazan, Elia (1909–2003), director and actor. Born in Istanbul but raised in America, he attended Williams College and did graduate work at Yale before joining the Group Theatre as an apprentice. He appeared with the company as an actor in such plays as Men in White (1933), Waiting for Lefty (1935), Johnny Johnson (1936), Golden Boy (1937), and The Gentle People (1939). Kazan's first major directorial assignment was Casey Jones (1938), but it was his freshly imaginative staging of The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) that gave his career its major boost. Among his subsequent successes (some of which he co‐produced) were Harriet (1943), One Touch of Venus (1943), Deep Are the Roots (1945), All My Sons (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), Tea and Sympathy (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), J. B. (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and After the Fall (1964). He staged this last play when he assumed the co‐directorship (with Robert Whitehead) of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, but his tenure was not a success, so he withdrew from the theatre in general. Kazan was also a founding member of the Actors Studio. As his list of credits suggests, he was the most important American director of the late 1940s and the 1950s, bringing a vitality and poetic intensity to virtually all his efforts. John Mason Brown observed of his work on Streetcar, “He succeeds in combining stylization with realism. He is able to capture to the full the inner no less than the outer action of the text. He knows when to jab a climax, when to rely on mood, when to focus the attention pitilessly on the principals, or when to establish . . . the tenement atmosphere.”