Ben Gazzara, actor of risk-taking, is dead at 81

Ben Gazzara, actor of risk-taking, is dead at 81:  Ben Gazzara, an acute amateur whose continued career included arena Brick in the aboriginal “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, roles in affecting films by John Cassavetes and plan with several ancestors of top Hollywood directors, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 81.

The could cause was pancreatic cancer, his lawyer, Jay Julien, said. Mr. Gazzara lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Gazzara advised with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, area the careers of stars like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a belly presence. It becoming him approved plan beyond bisected a century, not alone onstage — his endure Broadway actualization was in the awakening of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s alternation “Run for Your Life.”

If Mr. Gazzara never accomplished Brando’s stature, that was partly because of a assertive laissez-faire access to his career: an aboriginal suspicion of film, a abhorrence to go afterwards adorable roles.

“When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said in a 1998 account on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t acquaint you the pictures I angry down because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was a fool.”

And yet Mr. Gazzara’s constant acceptability may able-bodied blow on his blur work, accurately the movies he fabricated with Mr. Cassavetes, the amateur and administrator admired by cinephiles for his adventurousness absolute projects and a authoritative actualization that encouraged spontaneity.

The two had had bit locations in the 1969 ball “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” but it was in “Husbands” (1970), directed by Mr. Cassavetes, that they, forth with Peter Falk, absolutely fabricated an consequence as awfully affiliated men out for a bashed night on the boondocks together. As Mr. Gazzara wrote in his autobiography, “In the Moment” (2004), the on-camera brotherhood was so acceptable that humans affected the three men had been constant friends; in actuality they had almost accepted one addition if the filming began, admitting they became accompany during it.

Mr. Gazzara’s a lot of important role for Mr. Cassavetes was in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976), in which he played a band club buyer in debt to the mob. “It’s a thoughtful, able estimation of a role that just may not accept as abundant abyss to it as he’s accessible to accord it,” Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Gazzara’s performance.

In 1977 Mr. Gazzara had a acknowledging role abaft Mr. Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands, in the backstage adventure “Opening Night,” with Mr. Cassavetes afresh directing. Speaking of Mr. Cassavetes recently, Mr. Gazzara said, “He set the altitude for an amateur to feel chargeless to accord whatever, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.” Mr. Cassavetes died in 1989.

Two years afterwards authoritative “Opening Night,” Mr. Gazzara abutting armament with addition important director, Peter Bogdanovich, who gave him a attenuate arch role in “Saint Jack,” an adjustment of Paul Theroux’s atypical about an American who operates a brothel in Singapore. He formed afresh for Mr. Bogdanovich in “They All Laughed” (1981), as a clandestine detective who avalanche in adulation with the woman he is assigned to follow. The woman was played by Audrey Hepburn, with whom Mr. Gazzara had a abrupt affair afterwards they met on the set of the 1979 blur “Bloodline.”

Mr. Gazzara formed with abundant added notable directors, a part of them Otto Preminger, whose attorneys ball “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) featured Mr. Gazzara as a aggressive man who is approved for killing his wife’s defacer and dedicated by James Stewart’s alone lawyer. In David Mamet’s 1997 film, “The Spanish Prisoner,” he played the possibly adroit bang-up of an artist who has appear up with a admired idea. Wearing a glossy white suit, he was a ambassador of pornographic movies in the Coen brothers’ “Big Lebowski” in 1998. In Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” in 1999, he was a mobster.

Beginning in the aboriginal 1980s Mr. Gazzara spent abundant stretches of time acting in movies in Italy, area he had a alcazar in Umbria. He appeared in Marco Ferreri’s 1981 adjustment of Charles Bukowski’s “Tales of Ordinary Madness”; “Il Camorrista” (1986), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore; and Stefano Mignucci’s “Bandits” (1995).

“You go area they adulation you,” he said in a 1994 account with Cigar Aficionado, answer his plan in Italy.

Mr. Gazzara had alongside careers on the date and in television. His aboriginal cogent date role was as a cheating annoyer called Jocko in “End as a Man,” about activity in a Southern aggressive academy. Developed at the Actors Studio, it opened on Broadway in 1953. “Jocko is attractive, able and active on the surface, but angry at the core,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times, “and Mr. Gazzara’s acting altogether expresses this ambivalence.”

Then, in March 1955, came “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in which he played the alcoholic son Brick to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Tennessee Williams classic, with Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie. Elia Kazan directed. The play ran till November 1956, but Mr. Gazzara larboard the casting aboriginal to yield addition Broadway role, in “A Hatful of Rain,” which opened in the abatement of 1955. He played a blockhead aficionado called Johnny Pope, and the achievement becoming him a Tony Award nomination.

But his next Broadway venture, “The Night Circus,” bankrupt in beneath than a anniversary in 1958, and he did not acknowledgment to Broadway until a awakening of Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” in 1963. His added Broadway plan included a 1976 assembly of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” adverse Colleen Dewhurst, which becoming him addition Tony nomination, as did his bifold roles in a 1975 bifold bill of O’Neill’s “Hughie” and David Scott Milton’s “Duet.”

Mr. Gazzara aswell acted in Off Broadway and bounded productions, a part of them “Nobody Don’t Like Yogi,” a one-man actualization about Yogi Berra, which Mr. Gazzara began assuming in 2003 and took all over the country for two years.

He was a accustomed attendance on television. “Run for Your Life,” in which he played a terminally ill man, was apparent on NBC from 1965 to 1968, earning him two Emmy nominations. He was nominated afresh for his role as the ancestor of a adolescent man with AIDS in the 1985 television cine “An Aboriginal Frost”; his old acquaintance Ms. Rowlands played his wife. He won a supporting-actor Emmy for his plan in the 2002 HBO blur “Hysterical Blindness,” arena the adventurous absorption of a actualization afresh played by Ms. Rowlands.

Mr. Gazzara was built-in Biagio Anthony Gazzara on the East Side of Manhattan on Aug. 28, 1930, the son of Antonio Gazzara, a laborer who did carpentry and laid bricks, and the above Angela Cusumano. Both his parents had immigrated from Italy, and they generally batten Italian at home, giving Mr. Gazzara a accent accomplishment that served him able-bodied if he began authoritative films there. He grew up in a architecture at 29th Street and Aboriginal Avenue, where, he wrote in his autobiography, he slept on the blaze escape in summer and occasionally heard screams from the patients at Bellevue psychiatric hospital.

When he was about 11, he saw a acquaintance act in a play at the Madison Square Boys Club and was apathetic by the acting bug himself. He performed in shows there and, if he was older, begin his way to the Dramatic Workshop in Midtown. A radio extra he met there, Louise Erickson, who would become his aboriginal wife, told him about the Actors Studio, and in 1951 he auspiciously auditioned for it.

That alliance concluded in 1957. In 1961 he affiliated the extra Janice Rule, whom he had met in 1959 if they appeared in a brief assembly of “The Night Circus.” They had a daughter, Elizabeth. That marriage, too, concluded in divorce, not continued afterwards Mr. Gazzara met a German model, the above Elke Stuckmann, while filming the war cine “Inchon” in Seoul in 1979.

They were affiliated in 1982; she and his babe survive him, as does addition daughter, Danja, his wife’s adolescent from a antecedent relationship, whom Mr. Gazzara adopted. A brother, Anthony, aswell survives.

Mr. Gazzara was advised for articulate blight in 1999, but he said his bigger bloom action was adjoin depression, abiding on and off for decades. In a 2005 actualization afore a accumulation of brainy bloom professionals, he recalled ambidextrous with the action 25 years beforehand while cutting “They All Laughed.”

“I was in a abasement during the accomplished shooting, and I was agitating in that film,” he said. “And I don’t bethink accomplishing it.”