Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan, born Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7 1909 in Constantinople of the Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey), was noted for his creative stage direction and for drawing strong dramatic performances from actors; he directed 21 performers to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. His filmography includes A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955). Over his career Kazan received two Academy Awards for Best Director, an Honorary Oscar, three Tony Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. His movies often addressed personal or social issues of particular concern to him, and he stated, “I don’t move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme.” The first of these “issue” films was Gentleman's Agreement (1947) starring Gregory Peck, which examined anti‑Semitism in America; it earned eight Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan’s first Best Director award. This was followed by Pinky (1949), one of the earliest mainstream Hollywood pictures to confront racial prejudice against Black people. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an adaptation of a stage play he had also directed, received twelve Oscar nominations and four wins and marked Marlon Brando’s breakthrough role. In 1954 Kazan directed On the Waterfront, a film about union corruption on New York’s harbor waterfront, and in 1955 he directed John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which introduced James Dean to movie audiences. A turning point came when Kazan testified before the House Committee on Un‑American Activities in 1952 during the Hollywood blacklist; his testimony provoked strong negative reactions from many liberal friends and colleagues and contributed to the career ends of actors Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith and playwright Clifford Odets. Kazan later justified the action as choosing “the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong.” Decades later his anti‑Communist testimony remained controversial; when he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors did not applaud while about 250 demonstrators picketed the ceremony. His issue‑driven subjects influenced films of the 1950s and 1960s, and director Stanley Kubrick called him “without question, the best director we have in America, and capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses.” Elia Kazan died of natural causes on September 28 2003 at age 94 in his Manhattan apartment, New York City. Martin Scorsese co‑directed the documentary A Letter to Elia (2010) as a personal tribute to him.