Jack Garfein

Actor · Director · Writer

Mukachevo, Zakarpatskaya oblast, USSR [now Ukraine]

July 2, 1930

Biography

Jakob Garfein[1] (July 2, 1930 – December 30, 2019) was an American film and theatre director, acting teacher, and a key figure of the Actors Studio. Growing up in Bardejov, Czechoslovakia during the rise of Nazism,[2] Garfein was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 13 and survived 11 concentration camps. In 1946, as an orphaned teen, he was among an early group of Holocaust[3] survivors to arrive in the U.S, and he obtained his American citizenship in 1952. After studying at the Dramatic Workshop[4] in New York, Garfein became the first theater director to be awarded membership in the Actors Studio. He put on its first-ever play to move to Broadway, End as a Man (1953), and expanded the influence of Method Acting to Hollywood with the founding of Actors Studio West, alongside Paul Newman, in 1966. He was a teacher to actors Sissy Spacek, Ron Perlman, Irène Jacob, James Thierrée, Laetitia Casta, and Samuel Le Bihan. He directed Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Shelley Winters, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Ralph Meeker, Mark Richman, Mildred Dunnock, and Elaine Stritch, and discovered Steve McQueen, Bruce Dern, George Peppard, Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Albert Salmi, and Paul Richards. He also gave James Dean his first acting role in End as a Man (1953). Working in Hollywood, Garfein collaborated with directors Elia Kazan and George Stevens[5] on the sets of Baby Doll (1956) and Giant (1956). Shortly after, he authored two both politically and artistically challenging films that did not spare Hollywood's conservatism and led to censorship. In The Strange One (1957), he tackled the question of racism in America. As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, he was shocked by segregation upon his arrival in the United States, and he fought for the right for African-American actors to be featured in the film. The Strange One was censored by the Motion Picture Production Code for general "homosexual overtones" and "excessive brutality and suggestive sequences [that] tend to arouse disrespect for lawful authority."