Manhattan: 4 February 2012 --
Ben
Gazzara, who starred as Don Bosco in the film by that name
produced
by Leandro Castellani in 1988 in the year of the Centenary of
Don
Bosco's death, died of pancreatic cancer in New York on
Friday, 3
February 2012. He was 81.
It was fortunate for the
Salesians at the time that Gazzara had chosen, in the 1980s,
to return
to the country of his parents' origins, Italy. “You go where
they love
you,” he said in a 1994 interview with Cigar Aficionado,
explaining his
work in Italy. And certainly at the time, he was considered
the right
man for the job, as far as Leandro Castellani was concerned
(Castellani
also taught at the UPS, Rome, hence the 'Salesian' connection)
though
he is described by The Guardian reviewer, Brian Baxter, as
playing "a
less amiable Don Bosco". Whether this is a comment on Don
Bosco or not
is unclear - the 'less' is probably by comparison with an
amiable
mobster in another of Gazzara's 'Italian' period, Il Cammorista, or in
English, The Professor,
story of a Neapolitan gangster).
Born
Biagio Anthony Gazzara on Aug. 28, 1930, he grew up in a
cold-water
flat on New York's East Side, speaking Italian as his first language. Despite the
hardships,
Gazzara persevered to study engineering at City College of New
York but
gravitated to acting, going on to study with Lee Strasberg at
the
Actors Studio. His career, then, began with live theatre. He
made his
film debut as a sociopathic military academy cadet in the 1957
drama
"The Strange One," followed by his breakout role as an accused
killer
in Otto Preminger's 1959 hit courtroom drama "Anatomy of a
Murder."
While Gazzara was never outstanding, he is perhaps one of the
most
enduring nad well-known actors on the screen, both large and
small. He
gained several Emmy nominations for best leading actor in a
drama
series. He even directed a couple of Colombo
episodes. Some of his best performances, however were the
formidable
characters he created with his friend John Cassavetes in the
1970s.
They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes's film Husbands (1970), in which
he appeared alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
(1976).
Gazzara even did some real-life hero stuff. During filming of
the war movie The Bridge at
Remagen
(1969) in which he co-starred with his friend Robert Vaughn,
the Warsaw
Pact invaded what was then Czechoslovakia. Filming was halted
temporarily, and the cast and crew were detained before
filming was
completed in West Germany. During their departure from
Czechoslovakia,
Gazzara and Vaughn assisted with the escape of a Czech
waitress whom
they had befriended. They smuggled her to Austria in a car
waved
through a border crossing that had not yet been taken over by
the
Soviet army in its crackdown on the Prague Spring.
Married three times, Gazzara is survived by his third wife and
a daughter.
Spare a little prayer for someone whom maybe we can call a
'friend of Don Bosco'
