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Ben Gazzara (born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on August
28, 1930, in New York City), is an actor in
television and motion pictures.

Gazzara grew up on New York's tough Lower East
Side, Manhattan|Lower East Side.  He found relief
from his bleak surroundings in joining a theater
company at a very young age.  Years later, he said
that the discovery of his love for acting saved
him from the crime that was all around him during
his teenage years.  Despite his obvious talent, he
went to City College of New York to study
electrical engineering.  After two years, he gave
up on it and after a short intermission he finally
joined the Actor's Studio.

In the 1950s, he starred in various Broadway
productions, most notably Tennessee Williams' Cat
On A Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan. 
However he lost out on the film role to Paul
Newman.

He has had a long and varied acting career, with
spells as an accomplished director too (TV
mostly). His most popular acting roles include
Anatomy of a Murder (1959), A Rage to Live (1965),
The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Capone (1975),
Voyage of the Damned (1976) and High Velocity
(1977).

His most formidable appearances however were
characters he impersonated for his friend John
Cassavetes in the 1970s.  They collaborated for
the first time on Cassavetes' film Husbands (1970)
where he appeared alongside Peter Falk and
Cassavetes himself. The collaboration of the two
men achieved its peak in The killing of a chinese
bookie wherein Ben Gazzara took the leading role
of the hapless strip joint owner Cosmo Vitelli. In
order to pay off a gambling debt to the mob,
Vitelli agrees to kill a chinese unknown to him.
Against all odds he succeeds in killing the man,
but he gets severely wounded during his flight.
But the gangsters turn against him as they had not
expected him to survive the assassination and
Vitelli is forced to kill these men too. The plot
itself does hardly describe the true meaning of
the movie as John Cassavetes did everything to
keep it from turning into an ordinary genre flick:
Ben Gazzara delivered a lifelike impersonation of
a simple man who found his happiness in running a
third rate strip bar and who gets caught in
something that is much too big for him, sometimes
he does not even seem to understand the whole
meaning of it. The little emotional involvement
Gazzara's character shows during the events is
played with stunning accuracy, Gazzara's
performance and Cassavetes' direction amending
each other. One year later Gazzara starred in yet
another Cassavetes directed movie, Opening Night,
taking the role of stage director Manny Victor who
struggles with the mentally unstable star of his
show, played by Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands.

In the 1980's he could be seen in a variety of
different movies, such as They all laughed
(directed by Peter Bogdanovich) or Quicker Than
the Eye (1989).

In the 1990's he appeared in 38 films, among these
many TV productions. In Hollywood movies he mostly
appeared as a supporting actor, but worked with
several renowned directors such as the Coen
Brothers (The Big Lebowski), Spike Lee (Summer of
Sam) and John McTiernan (The Thomas Crown Affair).

Now in his seventies, Gazzara is still acting.  In
2003, he appeared in the film Dogville, directed
by Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier,
alongside Nicole Kidman.  Soon he can be seen in
another movie directed by the Coen Brothers,
Paris, je t'aime.

==External links==
*imdb name|id=0001262|name=Ben Gazzara