austraLasia #3008

Death of Ben Gazzara

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'