Elia Kazan, the immigrant child of a Greek rug merchant who became one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history, died yesterday at his home in New York. He was 94.
Kazan's achievements in theater and cinema helped define the American experience for more than a generation. For Broadway, his legendary productions included A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, The Skin of Our Teeth, All My Sons, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Tea and Sympathy and J.B.
His movie classics include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!, East of Eden, Splendor in the Grass and America, America.
Kazan was a founder and longtime co-director of the Actors Studio; a founder with Robert Whitehead of the first repertory theater at Lincoln Center; a member of the fabled Group Theater in the 1930s; the favorite director of a generation of new American playwrights, including the two most important, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; and in his later years a best-selling novelist. He received best-director Tony Awards for staging two of Miller's plays, All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), and Archibald MacLeish's J.B. (1959).
To many critics, he was the best director of American actors in stage and screen history, discovering Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty and redefining the craft of film acting. In 1953 the critic Eric Bentley wrote that "the work of Elia Kazan means more to the American theater than that of any current writer."
In Hollywood, seven of his films won a total of 20 Academy Awards. He won best-director Oscars for Gentleman's Agreement, a 1947 indictment of anti-Semitism, and On the Waterfront in 1954. On the Waterfront, a searing depiction of venality and corruption on the New Jersey docks, won eight Oscars. Kazan also received an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999.
That award was controversial because in 1952 Kazan angered many of his friends and colleagues when he acknowledged before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936 and gave the committee the names of eight other party members. He had previously refused to do so, and his naming of names prompted many people in the arts, including those who had never been Communists, to excoriate him for decades.
