Actors - John Cassavetes

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	Actors - John Cassavetes

John Nicholas Cassavetes (December 9, 1929 - February 3, 1989) was a Greek American actor, screenwriter, and director. Cassavetes created an American form of cinéma vérité with his innovative camera use, intensely emotional outlook, and emphasis on improvisation. Film critic Ray Carney called him "the father of American independent film".

Life and Work

Cassavetes was born in New York City to Nicholas John Cassavetes and Katherine Demetri, both of whom were Greek immigrants. He grew up on Long Island, New York and attended high school at Blair Academy in New Jersey before moving to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. On graduation in 1950, he continued acting in the theater. By 1953, he was doing small parts in films; he continued to play a James Dean-like "juvenile delinquent" throughout the 1950s. Cassavetes also acted on television, which was still finding its feet as a medium. His experience working within television's budgetary and schedule limits influenced his later film production style.

NOTE: Cassavetes did not, as is often reported, attend Colgate University. (See Raymond Carney's collection of interviews Cassavetes on Cassvetes)

Early films and acting

During this time he met and married actress Gena Rowlands, a fellow television actor, who was a year younger than he was. By 1956 Cassavetes had begun teaching method acting in workshops in New York City. An improvisation exercise in one workshop inspired the idea for his writing and directorial debut, Shadows
(1959). Cassavetes raised the funds for production from friends and family, as well as listeners to a late-night radio talk show.

Cassavetes was unable to get American distributors to carry Shadows, so he took it to Europe, where it won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. European distributors later released the movie in the United States as an import.

Although the viewership of Shadows in the United States was slight, it did gain attention from the Hollywood studios. Cassavetes directed two movies for Hollywood in the early 1960s — Too Late Blues and A Child is Waiting — but the experience was exasperating. The intervention of the studios, the lack of creative control, and the over-all dumbing down of his work was unbearable. Cassavetes refused to go through the process again.

His strategy, brought on by necessity, was to work as an actor in mainstream movies, and channel the funds he made there into his work as a director. He didn't just clockwatch as an actor, though; he did masterful work in blockbuster hits of the late 1960s, including a short fuse army prisoner in the World War II epic The Dirty Dozen
(1967) — for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — and in arguably his most famous onscreen role as Guy Woodhouse, Mia Farrow's struggling actor husband, who redefines what it means to sell out in Roman Polanski's classy thriller Rosemary's Baby
(1968). He also turned in stellar work as a sinister nemesis to Kirk Douglas in the CIA thriller The Fury
(1978), which provided one of the genre's most unforgettable demises of a villain.

His next independent film was Faces
, which lay down new themes for later work. Starring Cassavetes's wife Rowlands, Faces depicted a contemporary suburban marriage in the process of slow disintegration, with the accompanying desperate and degrading sexual improprieties. Cassavetes held an unflinching camera on the pettiness and emotional greed of the distancing husband and wife and their lovers, but in the end the pathos of their story gives them an unexpected dignity. Faces was a critical and financial success, nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Supporting Actor and Actress).

After Faces Cassavetes could concentrate more fully on his directorial work. He had enough leverage at this point that he could make movies in the studio system, yet retain full creative control. Husbands (1970) starred Cassavetes himself, with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. They play a trio of men escaping their marriages for minor peccadillos. Another in the 1970s include Minnie and Moskowitz, about a misdirected young woman seeking love, and starring Rowlands again with a small part for Cassavetes's mother, Katherine.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for John Cassavetes ]

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Actors - John Cassavetes

Life and Work

Early films and acting

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