Elia Kazan Biography 2022
Biography of Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan (Elia Kazantzoglou) was born on September 7, 1909. American film director and writer of Greek origin.
Elia Kazan was an actor and theater director in the 1930s, made a name for himself on Broadway in the 1940s, and in 1947 was a co-founder of the Actors' Studio.
He disseminated Konstantin Stanislavski's theories about the perfect psychological and physical identification with the role, the so-called Method of Acting, who had a breakthrough with his production of A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway in 1947.
Marlon Brando had the lead role and got it again in the film adaptation in 1951, which marked the method's breakthrough in film and broke radically with the star types of earlier times and the soberly muted playing style of the 1940s.
Elia Kazan's direction then produced landmark acting performances in the film adaptation of American writer John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden (1955) with James Dean, Baby Doll (1956) with Carroll Baker and Eli Wallach, and Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty.
Among his other significant works are socially critical On The Waterfront (1954) about union tyranny and A Face in the Crowd (1957) about media-created idols. Both films were in line with his first and, for the time, courageous debate film Gentleman's Agreement (1947) about anti-Semitism and Pinky (1949) about racial hatred.
In the 1960s, Kazan made autobiographical America, America (1963) and The Arrangement (1969) based on his own novels.
Elia Kazan ended his directorial career with the F. Scott Fitzgerald film adaptation The Last Tycoon (1976). Still, she continued his novel writing, e.g., The Understudy (1975), Acts of Love (1978), and the autobiography Elia Kazan: A Life (1988).
Died on September 28, 2003.
last updated September 2022
