Clifford Odets
Born	(1906-07-18)July 18, 1906 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	August 14, 1963(1963-08-14) (aged 57) Los Angeles, California
Spouse	Luise Rainer (1937-1940) Bette Grayson (1943-1951)[1]

Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963)^[2] was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director.

Early life[link]

Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis Odets (born Gorodetsky) and Pearl Geisinger, Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York.^[3] He dropped out of high school after two years to become an actor. In 1931, he became a founding member of the Group Theatre, a highly influential New York theatre company that utilized an acting technique new to the United States. This technique was based on the system devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski. It was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method. Odets eventually became the Group's primary playwright.

Career[link]

Theatre[link]

Odets pursued acting with great passion and ingenuity. At the age of 19 he struck out on his own, billing himself as ″The Rover Reciter.″ Under this moniker he procured bookings as a radio elocutionist.^[4] He moved away from his parents, to Greenwich Village, where he acted with the Poet's Theatre under the direction of Village legend Harry Kemp.^[5] Odets claimed to have become America's first real disc jockey at about this time, at radio station WBNY, as well as a drama critic.^[6] In this capacity he saw the 1926 Broadway production of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock.^[7] O'Casey's work would prove to be a powerful influence on Odets.

Following stints as a dramatics counselor at Catskill summer camps and periods of employment in stock companies, in 1929 Odets got his Broadway break. He was cast as understudy to Spencer Tracy in Conflict by Vincent Lawrence.^[8] He landed his first job with the prestigious Theatre Guild in the fall of 1929, as an extra playing bit parts.^[9] Odets acted in small roles in a number of Theatre Guild productions between 1929 and 1931. It was at the Theatre Guild that he befriended the casting director, Cheryl Crawford. Crawford suggested that Harold Clurman, then a play reader for the Guild, invite Odets to a meeting to discuss new theatre concepts they were developing with Lee Strasberg.^[10] Odets was mesmerized by Clurman's talks, and became the last actor chosen for the Group Theatre's first summer of rehearsals in June, 1931, at Brookfield Center in Connecticut.^[11][12] From the start, Odets was relegated to small roles and understudying other actors. With the extra time on his hands and at Clurman's urging, he began to write plays. He wrote two early plays, an autobiographical piece entitled 910 Eden Street, and one about his hero, Beethoven. Clurman dismissed these two plays as juvenilia, but encouraged his friend to continue writing while steering him towards familiar milieus. In late 1932, Odets began writing a play about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, initially called I Got the Blues. He worked diligently on this play, sharing drafts of it with Clurman and promising parts to his fellow actors - often the same parts. While at Green Mansions, their 1933 summer rehearsal venue in Warrensburg, New York,^[13][14] the Group performed Act II of the play, now retitled Awake and Sing!, for other camp residents. The audience was enthusiastic,^[15] but the Group's leadership, Lee Strasberg in particular, was still, at this point, opposed to producing it.^[16][17]

Odets trained with the Group at their various summer rehearsal headquarters located in the Connecticut countryside and the Catskills. In addition to Brookfield Center and Green Mansions, these venues included Dover Furnace in Dutchess County (1932)^[18][19] and a large house in Ellenville, New York (1934).^[20][21] The Group spent the summer of 1936^[22][23] at Pine Brook Country Club in Fairfield County, Connecticut.^[24] Their final summer retreat was at Lake Grove, in Smithtown, New York, in 1939.^[25][26] Odets's Group training under Strasberg's tutelage was essential to his development as a playwright. He stated in an interview late in life that ″My chief influence as a playwright was the Group Theatre acting company, and being a member of that company. . . . And you can see the Group Theatre acting technique crept right into the plays.″^[27]

Odets's first play to be produced was the one-act Waiting for Lefty, on January 5, 1935, at the Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York City.^[28] The piece is a series of interconnected scenes depicting workers for a fictional taxi company, but inspired by an actual taxi strike.^[29] The focus alternates between the drivers' union meeting and vignettes from the workers' difficult and oppressed lives. Not all are taxi drivers. A young medical intern falls victim to anti-Semitism; a laboratory assistant's job is threatened if he doesn't comply with orders to spy on a colleague; couples are thwarted in marriage, and torn apart by the hopelessness of economic conditions caused by the Great Depression. The climax is a defiant call for the union to strike, which brought the entire opening night audience to its feet. The play can be performed in any acting space, including union meeting halls and on the street. Waiting for Lefty's unexpectedly wild success brought Odets international fame.

Awake and Sing!, produced in February 1935, is generally regarded as Odets's masterpiece. It has been cited as ″the earliest quintessential Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre."^[30] The play concerns the Berger family, living in the Bronx under the shadow of economic collapse. Odets's choice of opening the play in medias res, his dialogue style, and the fact that it was the first play on Broadway to focus entirely on a Jewish family, distinguish Awake and Sing! from other full-length plays of its time.

Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1937

The 1935 one-acts Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die, along with a number of other plays produced by the Group Theatre, are harsh criticisms of profiteers and exploitative economic systems during the Great Depression. These two early plays by Odets have been dismissed by some critics as left-wing propaganda. More commonly, however, Waiting for Lefty is considered iconic in the agitprop genre, and the piece is widely anthologized. Odets asserted that all of his plays deal with the human spirit persevering in the face of any opponent, whether or not the characters are depicted as struggling with the capitalist system. The highly successful Golden Boy (1937) portrays a young man torn between artistic and material fulfillment. Ironically, it was the Group Theatre's biggest commercial success. From Golden Boy on, Odets's work focused more on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as affected by the moral dilemmas of individual characters. In 1938 the Group presented Odets's Rocket to the Moon, a more reflective piece. Leftist critics rebuked Odets for abandoning his formerly overt political stance. The playwright George S. Kaufman queried, "Odets, where is thy sting?"^[31] Nonetheless, Rocket to the Moon garnered enough attention to place Odets on the cover of Time magazine in December 1938.^[32]

Odets's last play, The Flowering Peach, was produced on Broadway in 1954. The Flowering Peach was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955, but under pressure from Joseph Pulitzer Jr., the prize went instead to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which the jury considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees.^[33]

Four of Odets's plays – Golden Boy, Clash by Night, The Big Knife and The Country Girl – have been made into films, though Odets did not write the screenplays.

Hollywood[link]

The success of Odets's early plays attracted the attention of Hollywood producers. He first went to Hollywood in early 1936^[34] to write for the screen as well as the stage. From this point on he would spend most of his life in Hollywood. His initial intention was to make money to help subsidize the Group Theatre's run of his late-1935 play Paradise Lost^[35] and to help him fulfill his own financial obligations.^[36] His first screenplay was produced by Paramount and directed by Lewis Milestone. Starring Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll, The General Died at Dawn (1936) received some positive reviews, though Frank Nugent of the New York Times reiterated Kaufman's barb in his article's title.

Like most screenwriters of the time, Odets worked within the studio system until the advent of independent production in the 1950s. Thus Odets would often write drafts that were handed off to another screenwriter or team for further development. Odets declined to be credited for many of the films on which he worked. He did, however, accept principal credit as both screenwriter and director for None but the Lonely Heart (1944), adapted from the novel by Richard Llewellyn, and produced by RKO. The film starred Cary Grant, Ethel Barrymore (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress), Barry Fitzgerald, and Jane Wyatt.

Odets wrote the 1957 screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success, based on the novelette by Ernest Lehman and produced by the independent company Hill-Hecht-Lancaster. Starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, this film noir depicts the underbelly of the newspaper world. The character of J.J. Hunsecker, played by Lancaster, was voted the 35th most despicable villain in 100 years of film by the American Film Institute.^[37] Odets directed one other film, for which he also wrote the screenplay, The Story on Page One (1959).

Style[link]

Odets's dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk. Arthur Miller observed that, with Odets's first plays, ″For the very first time in America, language itself . . . marked a playwright as unique.″^[38] Odets's use of ethnic and urban speech patterns reflects the influence of another socialist playwright with proletarian concerns, Sean O'Casey. Other hallmarks of Odets's style are his humanistic point of view, and his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot, reflecting the influence of Anton Chekhov.^[39]

HUAC[link]

In May 1952, Odets was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA; more commonly, HUAC). He had belonged to the Communist Party for less than a year, between 1934 and 1935^[40] and sponsored many left-wing, progressive groups. He cooperated with the Committee to the extent that he responded to their questions, and reiterated names of Communist Party members who had been previously cited by his friend and former Group colleague, Elia Kazan. Prior to Kazan’s final testimony in April 1952, they agreed to name each other.^[41] Odets thereby avoided blacklisting, but reactions to his testimony confused him. He did not consider himself a cooperative witness. A partial transcript of Odets’ testimony can be found in Eric Bentley’s Thirty Years of Treason.^[42] Odets was reportedly tormented by public reaction to his testimony until his death in 1963. In his autobiography, Kazan recalls incidents of Odets being accosted in the street and snubbed in Hollywood restaurants after his HUAC appearance.^[43] Odets's productivity declined after his 1952 testimony.^[44]

Final Years[link]

In the early 1960s Odets contracted to write four of a proposed total of thirteen teleplays for NBC's new dramatic anthology, The Richard Boone Show, and to act as script supervisor.^[45] Two of Odets's finished scripts were aired posthumously: Big Mitch (December 10, 1963), and The Mafia (January 7, 1964).^[46] Odets also worked on the libretto for a projected musical version of Golden Boy. He died before the project came to fruition. Playwright William Gibson, a former student of Odets, completed the book.

Personal life[link]

Odets's first wife was the twice-winning Academy-Award actress Luise Rainer. His second wife was actress Bette Grayson. He also had relationships with actresses Frances Farmer and Fay Wray,^[47][48] among others. Grayson's death at 34 left Odets to care for their two children, Nora, born in 1945, and Walt Whitman,^[49] now a clinical psychologist, author and photographer, born in 1947.

Odets was hospitalized in midsummer 1963 with advanced colon cancer. He died at age 57 on August 14. He received bedside visits from such movie and theater friends as Marlon Brando, Lee Strasberg and Paula Strasberg, Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Shirley MacLaine, and Danny Kaye,^[50], among others. Renoir dedicated a chapter of his autobiography to his friendship with Odets.^[51] Kazan's autobiography also contains copious references to his relationship with Odets. Kaye would eventually star in the musical version of The Flowering Peach, entitled Two by Two.

Odets's ashes were interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Legacy[link]

Odets has been looked on by many as an icon of the American theatre. According to Arthur Miller, ″An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the press, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves and our prospects.″^[52] Marian Seldes writes that, ″Paddy Chayefsky, who felt competitive with Odets, . . . told an interviewer, ′There isn't a writer of my generation, especially a New York writer, who doesn't owe his very breath–his entire attitude toward theatre–to Odets.′″^[53]

Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost, in particular, have enjoyed numerous revivals since the 2008 economic crash. The Flowering Peach became the basis for the 1970 musical Two by Two. Golden Boy was made into a 1939 film and became the basis for a 1964 musical of the same name. Odets's screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success became the basis for the 2002 musical of the same name. Lincoln Center's 2006 revival of Awake and Sing!, directed by Bartlett Sher, won that year's Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Golden Boy, with Bartlett Sher again directing, is scheduled for a Fall 2012 revival at Lincoln Center.^[54] The Roundabout Theatre Company will present Odets's 1949 play, The Big Knife, in the Spring of 2013 at the American Airlines Theatre in New York. Doug Hughes will direct Bobby Cannavale in the lead role of Charlie Castle.^[55] The role was originated by Odets's former Group Theatre colleague, John Garfield.^[56]

Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Barton Fink contains a number of indirect visual and historical references to Odets’s personal appearance, background and career. But, according to the Coen brothers, the film is not meant to be biographical in relation to Odets.^[57]

Odets was the subject of a critically acclaimed biography by psychoanalyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson, wife of playwright William Gibson: Clifford Odets - American Playwright - The Years from 1906-1940. The biography was one component of an umbrella project undertaken by Brenman-Gibson on the subject of creativity. The biography was intended to be a three-volume work, with the second and third volumes to cover the final twenty-three years of Odets's life. However, Brenman-Gibson died in 2004, leaving the project unfinished. Apart from Brenman-Gibson's work, six critical biographies have appeared by the following authors: R. Baird Shuman (1962);^[58] Edward Murray (1968);^[59] Michael Mendelsohn (1969);^[60] Gerald Weales (1971);^[61] Harold Cantor (1978);^[62] and Christopher J. Herr (2003).^[63]

The Odets character was played by Jeffrey DeMunn in the film Frances, and by John Heard in the 1983 biography, Will There Be A Morning?, both about Frances Farmer.

Odets's name is mentioned in an episode of the NBC series Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, "The Wrap Party." The episode's subplot dealt with The Hollywood Ten.

Works[link]

Acted in[link]

• (1930) Midnight
• (1931) 1931–
• (1933) Big Night
• (1933) They All Come to Moscow
• (1933) Men in White
• (1934) Gold Eagle Guy
• (1935) Waiting for Lefty

Wrote[link]

• (1935) Waiting for Lefty (play)
• (1935) Awake and Sing! (play)
• (1935) Till the Day I Die (play)
• (1935) Paradise Lost (play)
• (1935) I Can't Sleep^{[disambiguation needed ]} (monologue)
• (1936) The General Died at Dawn (screenplay)
• (1936) The Silent Partner (play, unproduced)
• (1936) Introduction to Modern Library edition of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls
• (1937) Golden Boy (play)
• (1938) Rocket to the Moon (play)
• (1940) Night Music (play)
• (1941) Clash by Night (play)
• (1942) The Russian People (play, adaptation)
• (1944) None but the Lonely Heart (screenplay, adaptation)
• (1946) Humoresque (screenplay adaptation, with Zachary Gold)^[64]
• (1946) Notorious (dialogue: love scenes; uncredited)
• (1946) Deadline at Dawn (screenplay)
• (1949) The Big Knife (play)
• (1950) The Country Girl (play)
• (1954) The Flowering Peach (play)
• (1957) Sweet Smell of Success (screenplay)
• (1961) Wild in the Country (screenplay)

Directed[link]

• (1944) None but the Lonely Heart (film, from Odets' adaptation of the Llewellan novel)
• (1950) The Country Girl (play, original Broadway production)
• (1954) The Flowering Peach (play, original Broadway production)
• (1959) The Story on Page One (film, from Odets' original screenplay)

See also[link]

• Stella Adler
• Awake and Sing!
• The Big Knife
• Phoebe Brand
• Morris Carnovsky
• Clash by Night
• Harold Clurman
• The Country Girl
• Frances Farmer
• John Garfield
• Golden Boy (play)
• Golden Boy (film)
• Cary Grant
• Bette Grayson
• Group Theatre
• Elia Kazan
• List of Jewish American Playwrights
• Arthur Miller
• Luise Rainer
• The Richard Boone Show
• Rocket to the Moon (play)
• Lee Strasberg
• Two by Two
• Waiting for Lefty

References[link]

1. ^ Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years 1906-1940. New York: Atheneum, 1981. p. 617
2. ^ ProQuest Historical Newspapers, “The New York Times”, (1851-2006). “Obituary.” 15 August 15, 1963: 27
3. ^ John Lahr, "The Struggles of Clifford Odets.", The New Yorker, April 17, 2006
4. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 83
5. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 84
6. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, pp. 89, 90
7. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 92
8. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 132.
9. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 141
10. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 165
11. ^ Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years. New York: Hill and Wang, 1945. ed. 1968, p.36
12. ^ Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. p.32
13. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 264
14. ^ Smith, p. 139
15. ^ Clurman, p. 119
16. ^ Clifford Odets: American Playwright Margaret Brenman-Gibson 1982
17. ^ Clurman, p. 123
18. ^ Brenman-Gibson, p. 216
19. ^ Smith, p. 84
20. ^ Brenman-Gibson 1981, p. 287
21. ^ Smith, p. 180
22. ^ Clurman, p. 172
23. ^ Smith, pp. 264-65
24. ^ Images of America, Trumbull Historical Society, 1997, p. 123
25. ^ Brenman-Gibson, Margaret, p. 564
26. ^ Smith, p. 364
27. ^ Mendelsohn, Michael. Clifford Odets: Humane Dramatist. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1969, p. 9
28. ^ Clurman, p. 138
29. ^ Weales, Gerald. Clifford Odets, Playwright. New York: Pegasus 1971, pp. 39-43
30. ^ Schiff, Ellen. From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama Albany: SUNY Press, 1982, p. 33
31. ^ Hall, Donald, ed. (1981). The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes. New York: Oxford. p. 304. 
32. ^ Brenman-Gibson, p. 539
33. ^ Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich & Erika J. Fischer. The Pulitzer Prize Archive: A History and Anthology of Award-Winning Materials in Journalism, Letters, and Arts München: K.G. Saur, 2008. ISBN 3-598-30170-7 ISBN 9783598301704 p. 246
34. ^ Brenman-Gibson, p. 397
35. ^ Clurman, p. 162
36. ^ Brenman-Gibson, pp. 393, 397
37. ^ http://www.afi.com/100years/handv.aspx
38. ^ Miller, Arthur. Timebends. Penguin, 1995, p. 229
39. ^ Mendelsohn, Michael, p. 34
40. ^ Brenman-Gibson, pp. 296, 302
41. ^ Kazan, Elia, A Life. New York: Doubleday, 1988, pp. 462-63
42. ^ Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities 1938-1968. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, pp. 498-533
43. ^ Kazan, pp. 134-35
44. ^ "Waiting for Lefty (Historical Context), Answers.com http://www.answers.com/topic/waiting-for-lefty-play-5
45. ^ Weales, p. 184
46. ^ Weales, p. 185
47. ^ Wray, Fay. On the Other Hand: A Life Story. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1989, pp. 194-196; 204-213
48. ^ Odets, Clifford. The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets. New York: Grove Press, 1988. pp. 28, 204 et al.
49. ^ LCTreview.com
50. ^ Brenman-Gibson, pp. 8-11
51. ^ Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films. New York: Atheneum, 1974
52. ^ Miller, Arthur, p. 232
53. ^ Seldes, Marion. America's Fervent Playwright. Lincoln Center Theater Review, Spring 2006, p. 26
54. ^ [1]
55. ^ http://www.roundabouttheatre.org/Shows-Events/Big-Knife.aspx
56. ^ Odets, Clifford. The Big Knife. New York: Dramatists Play Service, ISBN 0-8222-0115-1, ISBN 978-0-8222-0115-1
57. ^ "That Barton Fink Feeling: An Interview with the Coen Brothers"
58. ^ Shuman, R. Baird. Clifford Odets. Twayne’s United States Authors. Ed. Bowman, Sylvia. New York: Twayne, 1962
59. ^ Murray, Edward. Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968
60. ^ Mendelsohn, Michael J. Clifford Odets: Humane Dramatist. 1st ed. Delano, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1969
61. ^ Weales, Gerald. Clifford Odets, Playwright. Pegasus American Authors. Ed. Ludwig, Prof. Richard M. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971
62. ^ Cantor, Harold. “Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet.” Dissertation: Ph.D. Diss. State University of New York at Binghamton, 1975
63. ^ Herr, Christopher J. Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003
64. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038622/fullcredits#writers. Accessed 19 April 2012.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Clifford Odets

• Clifford Odets Papers, 1926-1963. Held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
• Clifford Odets Sketches, 1946. Held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
• Clifford Odets at Online Archive of California
• Clifford Odets at the Internet Broadway Database
• Clifford Odets at the Internet Movie Database
• Almedia Projects: Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets

John Garfield
Warner Bros. publicity photo, c. late 1930s
Born	Jacob Julius Garfinkle (1913-03-04)March 4, 1913 New York City, New York
Died	May 21, 1952(1952-05-21) (aged 39) New York City, New York
Spouse	Roberta Seidman (1935–1952)
Children	Katherine Garfield (died, age 7), Julie Garfield, John Garfield Jr.

John Garfield (March 4, 1913 – May 21, 1952) was an American actor adept at playing brooding, rebellious, working-class character roles.^[1] He grew up in poverty in Depression-era New York City and in the early 1930s became an important member of the Group Theater. In 1937 he moved to Hollywood, eventually becoming one of Warner Bros.' major stars. Called to testify before the U.S. Congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he denied Communist affiliation and refused to "name names", effectively ending his film career. Some have claimed that the stress of this incident led to his premature death at 39 from a heart attack.^[2] Garfield is acknowledged as a predecessor of such Method actors as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean.

Youth[link]

Jacob Julius Garfinkle

Jacob Garfinkle was born in a small apartment on Rivington Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, to David and Hannah Garfinkle, Russian Jewish immigrants. In early infancy a middle name—Julius—was added, and for the rest of his life those who knew him well called him Julie. His father, a clothes presser and part time cantor, struggled to make a living and to provide even marginal comfort for his small family. When Garfield was five, his brother Max was born and their mother never fully recovered from what was described as a "difficult" pregnancy. She died two years later and the young boys were sent to live with various relatives, all poor, scattered across the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Several of these relatives lived in tenements in a section of East Brooklyn called Brownsville and there Garfield lived in one house and slept in another. At school he was judged a poor reader and speller, deficits that were aggravated by irregular attendance. He would later say of his time on the streets there, that he learned "all the meanness, all the toughness it's possible for kids to acquire."^[3]

His father remarried and moved to the West Bronx where Garfield joined a series of gangs. Much later he would recall: "Every street had its own gang. That's the way it was in poor sections... the old safety in numbers." He soon become gang leader. At this time people started to notice his ability to mimic well-known performers, both bodily and facially. He also began to hang out and eventually spar at a boxing gym on Jerome Avenue. At some point he contracted scarlet fever, (it was diagnosed later in adulthood) causing permanent damage to his heart and causing him to miss a lot of school. After being expelled three times and expressing a wish to quit school altogether, he parents sent him to P.S. 45, a school for difficult children. It was under the guidance of the school's principal—the noted educator Angelo Patri—that he was introduced to acting.^[2] Noticing Garfield's tendency to stammer, Patri assigned him to a speech therapy class taught by a charismatic teacher named Margaret O'Ryan. She gave him acting exercises and made him memorize and deliver speeches in front of the class and, as he progressed, in front of school assemblies. O'Ryan thought he had natural talent and cast him in school plays. She encouraged him to sign up for a city-wide debating competition sponsored by the New York Times. To his own surprise, he took second prize.

With Patri and O'Ryan's encouragement he began to take acting lessons at a drama school that was part of The Heckscher Foundation and began to appear in their productions. At one of the latter he received back-stage congratulations and an offer of support from the Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami who recommended him to the American Laboratory Theater. Funded by the Theatre Guild, "the Lab" had contracted with Richard Boleslavski to stage its experimental productions and with Russian actress and expatriate Maria Ouspenskaya to supervise classes in acting. Former members of the Moscow Art Theater, they were the first proponents of Stanislavsky's "system" in the United States. Garfield took morning classes and began volunteering time at the Lab after hours, auditing rehearsals, building and painting scenery, and doing crew work. He would later view this time as beginning his apprenticeship in the theater. Among the people becoming disenchanted with the Guild and turning to the Lab for a more radical, challenging environment were Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Franchot Tone, Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman. All would become strongly influential in Garfield's later career.

After a stint with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater and a short period of vagrancy involving hitchhiking, freight hopping, picking fruit, logging in the pacific northwest (Preston Sturges conceived the film Sullivan's Travels after hearing Garfield tell of his hobo adventures^[3]) Garfield made his Broadway debut in 1932, in a play called Lost Boy. It ran for only two weeks but gave Garfield something critically important for an actor struggling to break into the theater: a credit.

New York theater and The Group[link]

Garfield received feature billing in his next role, that of Henry the office boy, in Elmer Rice's play Counsellor-at-Law starring Paul Muni. The play ran for three months, made an eastern tour and returned for an unprecedented second return engagement, only closing when Muni was contractually compelled to return to Hollywood to make a film for Warners. At this point the Warner company expressed an interest in Garfield and sought to arrange a screen test. He turned them down.

Garfield's former colleagues Crawford, Clurman and Strasburg had begun a new theater collective, calling it simply "the Group", and Garfield lobbied his friends hard to get in. After months of rejection he began frequenting the inside steps of the Broadhurst Theater where the Group had its offices. Cheryl Crawford noticed him one day and greeted him warmly. Feeling encouraged, he made his request for apprenticeship. Something intangible impressed her and she recommended him to the other directors. They made no dissent.

Clifford Odets had been a close friend of Garfield from the early days in the Bronx. After Odets' one-act play Waiting for Lefty became a surprise hit, the Group announced it would mount a production of his full length drama Awake and Sing. At the playwright's insistence, Garfield was cast as Ralph, the sensitive young son who pled for "a chance to get to first base." The play opened in February 1935 and Garfield was singled out by critic Brooks Atkinson for having a "splendid sense of character development." Garfield's apprenticeship was officially over; he was voted full membership by the company. Odets was the man of the moment and he claimed to the press that Garfield was his "find"; that he would soon write a play just for him. That play would turn out to be Golden Boy and when Luther Adler was cast in the lead role instead, a disillusioned Garfield began to take a second look at the overtures being made by Hollywood.^[4]

Warner Bros.[link]

From the trailer for the film Four Daughters (1938)

Garfield had been approached by Hollywood studios before—both Paramount and Warners offering screen tests—but talks had always stalled over a clause he wanted inserted in his contract, one that would allow him time off for stage work. Now Warner Bros. acceded to his demand and Garfield signed a standard feature-player agreement—seven years with options—in Warner's New York office.^[5] Many in the Group were livid over what they considered his betrayal. Elia Kazan's reaction was different, suggesting that the Group did not so much fear that Garfield would fail, but that he would succeed.^[3] Jack Warner's first order of business was a change of name to John Garfield.

After many false starts he was finally cast in a supporting, yet crucial role as a tragic young composer in a Michael Curtiz film titled Four Daughters. After the picture's release in 1938, he received wide critical acclaim and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The studio quickly revised Garfield's contract—designating him a star player rather than a featured one—for seven years without options. They also created a name-above-the-title vehicle for him titled: They Made Me a Criminal. Before the breakout success of Daughters Garfield had made a B movie feature called Blackwell's Island. Not wanting their new star to appear in a low budget film, Warners ordered an A movie upgrade by adding an additional $100,000 to its budget and recalling its director Michael Curtiz to shoot newly scripted scenes.

Garfield's debut had a cinematic impact difficult to conceive in retrospect. As biographer Lawrence Swindell put it:

"Garfield's work was spontaneous, non-actory; it had abandon. He didn't recite dialogue, he attacked it until it lost the quality of talk and took on the nature of speech. The screen actor had been dialogue's servant, but now Julie had switched those roles. Like Cagney he was an exceptionally mobile performer from the start of his screen career. These traits were orchestrated with his physical appearance to create a screen persona innately powerful in the sexual sense. What Warners saw immediately was that Garfield's impact was felt by both sexes. This was almost unique."^[3]

From the trailer for the film Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

His "honeymoon" with Warners over, Garfield entered a protracted period of conflict with the studio, they attempting to cast him in crowd-pleasing melodramas like Dust Be My Destiny and he insisting on quality scripts that would offer a challenge and highlight his versatility. The result was often a series of suspensions, Garfield refusing an assigned role and Warners refusing to pay him. Garfield's problem was the same problem shared by any actor working in the studio system of the 1930s: by contract the studio had the right to cast him in any project they wanted to. But, as Robert Nott explains, "To be fair, most of the studios had a team of producers, directors, and writers who could pinpoint a particular star’s strengths and worked to capitalize on those strengths in terms of finding vehicles that would appeal to the public – and hence make the studio money. The forces that prevented him from getting high quality roles were really the result of the combined willpower of the Warner Bros., the studio system in general, and the general public, which also had its own perception of how Garfield (or Cagney or Bogart for that matter) should appear on screen."^[6] A notable exception to this trend was Daughters Courageous, the sequel to his debut film. Now considered a late 1930s classic, the film did well critically but failed to find an audience, the public dissatisfied that it was not a true sequel (hard to pull of since the original character Mickey Borden died in the first picture). The director Curtiz called the film "my obscure masterpiece".^[3]

At the onset of World War II, Garfield immediately attempted to enlist in the armed forces, but was turned down because of his heart condition.^[4] Frustrated, he turned his energies to supporting the war effort. He and actress Bette Davis were the driving forces behind the opening of the Hollywood Canteen, a club offering food and entertainment for American servicemen. He traveled overseas to help entertain the troops, made several bond selling tours and starred in a string of popular, patriotic films like Air Force, Destination Tokyo and Pride of the Marines (all box office successes). He was particularly proud of the latter film based on the life of Al Schmid, a war hero blinded in combat. In preparing for the role Garfield lived for several weeks with Schmid and his wife in Philadelphia and would blindfold himself for hours at a time.

After the war Garfield starred in a series of successful films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) with Lana Turner, Humoresque (1946) with Joan Crawford, and the Oscar-winning Best Picture Gentleman's Agreement (1947). In the latter film, Garfield took a featured, but supporting, part because he believed deeply in the film's exposé of antisemitism in America. In 1948, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring role in Body and Soul (1947). That same year, Garfield returned to Broadway in the play Skipper Next to God. A strong-willed and often verbally combative individual, Garfield did not hesitate to venture out on his own when the opportunity arose. In 1946, when his contract with Warner Bros. expired, Garfield decided not to renew it and opted to start his own independent production company, one of the first Hollywood stars to take this step.

The Red Scare[link]

Long involved in liberal politics, Garfield was caught up in the Communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He supported the Committee for the First Amendment, which opposed governmental investigation of political beliefs. When called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was empowered to investigate purported communist infiltration in America, Garfield refused to name communist party members or followers, testifying that, indeed, he knew none in the film industry. Garfield rejected Communism, and just prior to his death, in hopes of redeeming himself in the eyes of the blacklisters, wrote that he had been duped by Communist ideology, in an unpublished article "I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook", a reference to Garfield's movies about boxing.^[7] However, his forced testimony before the committee had severely damaged his reputation. He was blacklisted in Red Channels, and barred from future employment as an actor by Hollywood movie studio bosses for the remainder of his career.^[2]

With film work scarce because of the blacklist, Garfield returned to Broadway and starred in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy, finally being cast in the lead role denied him years before.

Death[link]

John Garfield's grave in Westchester Hills Cemetery

John Garfield's footstone

On May 9, 1952 Garfield moved out of his New York apartment for the last time, indicating to friends it was not a temporary separation. He confided to columnist Earl Wilson that he would soon be divorced. Close friends speculated that it was his wife's opposition to his plotted confession in Look magazine that triggered the separation. He heard that a HUAC investigator was reviewing his testimony for possible perjury charges. His agent reported that 20th Century wanted him for a film called Taxi but would not even begin talks unless the investigation concluded in his favor. Three actor friends Canada Lee, Mady Christians and J. Edward Bromberg had all recently died after being listed by the committee.^[3]

In the morning of May 20 Garfield, against his doctor's strict orders, played several strenuous sets of tennis with a friend, mentioning the fact that he had not been to bed the night before. He met actress Iris Whitney for dinner and afterward became suddenly ill complaining that he felt chilled. She brought him to her apartment where he refused to let her call a doctor and instead went to bed. The next morning she found him dead. Long-term heart problems, allegedly aggravated by the stress of his blacklisting,^[8] had led to his death at the age of 39.

The funeral was the largest in New York since Rudolph Valentino with over ten thousand persons crowding the streets outside. His estate, valued at "more than $100,000", was left entirely to his wife. Shortly afterward, ironically, the HUAC closed its investigation of John Garfield, leaving him in the clear. Garfield is interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester County, New York.

In 1954, the widowed Roberta Garfield married attorney Sidney Cohn, who died in 1991. She died in January 2004.^[9]

Personal life[link]

He and Roberta Seidman married in February 1935. Though his wife had been a member of the Communist Party,^[10] there was no evidence that Garfield himself was ever a Communist. They had three children: Katherine (1938–1945), who died of an allergic reaction on March 18, 1945, David (1943–1994), and Julie (born 1946), the latter two later becoming actors themselves.^[4]

Awards and nominations[link]

Garfield was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Four Daughters in 1939 and Best Actor for Body and Soul in 1948.

He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7065 Hollywood Boulevard.

Cultural references[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Doc Sportello, the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, discusses his film appearances throughout the book. The John Prine song "The Late John Garfield Blues" is inspired by Garfield.

Filmography[link]

Features[link]

Short subjects[link]

• Swingtime in the Movies (1938)
• Meet the Stars #1: Chinese Garden Festival (1940)
• Show Business at War (1943)
• Screen Snapshots: The Skolsky Party (1946)
• Screen Snapshots: Out of This World Series (1947)

Documentary[link]

• The John Garfield Story (2003) (available on Warner Home Video's 2004 DVD of The Postman Always Rings Twice)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Morris, George. John Garfield. New York, Jove Publications, 1977 ISBN 0-15-646250-8
• McGrath, Patrick J. (2006). John Garfield: The Illustrated Career in Films And on Stage. North Carolina: McFarland & Co., Inc.. pp. 273. ISBN 978-0-7864-2848-9. http://books.google.com/books?id=YfRpu4IB89AC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Garfield

• John Garfield at the Internet Movie Database
• John Garfield at the Internet Broadway Database
• John Garfield – The first Rebel
• John Garfield at Find a Grave

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2011)

Kim Stanley
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1961
Born	Patricia Reid (1925-02-11)February 11, 1925 Tularosa, New Mexico, U.S.
Died	August 20, 2001(2001-08-20) (aged 76) Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.
Alma mater	Actors Studio University of New Mexico
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1950–1985
Spouse	Bruce Hall (1945–1946; divorced) Curt Conway (1949–1956; divorced) 2 children Alfred Ryder (1958–1964; divorced) 1 child Joseph Siegel (1964–1967; divorced)

Kim Stanley (February 11, 1925 – August 20, 2001) was an American actress, primarily in television and theatre, but with occasional film performances.

She began her acting career in theatre, and subsequently attended the Actors Studio in New York City, New York. She received the 1952 Theatre World Award for her role in The Chase (1952), and starred in the Broadway productions of Picnic (1953) and Bus Stop (1955). Stanley was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for her roles in A Touch of the Poet (1959) and A Far Country (1962).

During the 1950s, Stanley was a prolific performer in television, and later progressed to film, with a well-received performance in The Goddess (1959). She was the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and starred in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was less active during the remainder of her career; two of her later film successes were as the mother of Frances Farmer in Frances (1982), for which she received a second Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and as Pancho Barnes in The Right Stuff (1983). She received an Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie for her performance as Big Mama in a television adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1985).

Last years[link]

She did not act during her later years, preferring the role of teacher, in Los Angeles, California, and later Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she died in 2001, of uterine cancer.

Early life[link]

Stanley was born Patricia Reid in Tularosa, New Mexico, the daughter of Ann (née Miller), an interior decorator, and J. T. Reid, a professor of philosophy and education at the University of New Mexico, located in Albuquerque.^[1] Her father was of Irish or Scottish descent, born and raised in Texas, where he met her mother (who was of German and English ancestry). She had three brothers (Howard Clinton Reid, a psychiatrist; Kenneth Reid, killed in pilot training during World War II; and Justin Truman Reid, a lawyer); and a half-sister, Carol Ann Reid.^[1] She was a drama major at the University of New Mexico and later studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and adopted her maternal grandmother's surname as her stage name.^[1]

Career[link]

Stanley was a successful Broadway actress with only a few film roles. She was singled out by The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson for her early work. She eventually attended the Actors Studio, studying under Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. She received the 1952 Theatre World Award for her performance as Anna Reeves in The Chase,^[2] and starred in such Broadway hits as Picnic (1953), playing Millie Owens (which she never felt received the credit it deserved) and Bus Stop (1955), playing Cherie.

She was nominated for the 1959 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for A Touch of the Poet and the 1962 Tony for Best Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Elizabeth von Ritter in Henry Denker's A Far Country. Stanley also portrayed Maggie "The Cat" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the original London production of the play. She was a leading lady of live television drama, which flourished in New York City during the 1950s. Among her many starring roles was Wilma, a star-struck 15-year-old girl from the U.S. Gulf Coast of Texas in Horton Foote's A Young Lady of Property, which aired on The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse on April 5, 1953. Following a savaging by English critics after her London performance of "Masha" in an Actors Studio production of Anton Chekhov's play The Three Sisters (1965) she vowed never to perform on stage again, a vow she kept for the rest of her life.^{[citation needed]}

Film[link]

Her first film was The Goddess (1958), playing a tragic movie star modeled on Marilyn Monroe (though she and director, John Cromwell, would forever deny Marilyn's influence, using Rita Hayworth as being more accurate). She starred in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), winning both the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

A filmed version of Strasberg-directed Three Sisters (1966) opened with Stanley reprising the role of Masha, and is the only time one can see her perform in a film alongside Geraldine Page, Sandy Dennis, Shelley Winters and other well-known names of the Actors Studio. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture for her performance as Frances Farmer's possessive mother in Frances (1982). She also played Pancho Barnes in The Right Stuff (1983). Stanley was the uncredited narrator in the drama film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). As the narrator, she represents the character Jean Louise Finch ("Scout") as an adult. Mary Badham portrays Scout as a child in the film.

She received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for her appearance in the episode, "A Cardinal Act of Mercy" (1963), of the television series, Ben Casey (1961–1966), and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or a Special for her appearance in Tennessee Williams's Southern melodrama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1985), this time as Big Mama.

Personal life[link]

Stanley was married four times – Bruce Hall (1945–1946), Curt Conway (1949– 1956), Alfred Ryder (1958–1964) and Joseph Siegel (1964–1967) – with all four marriages ending in divorce. She had three children, one by Conway, one by Brooks Clift (brother of Montgomery Clift) while she was married to Conway, and one by Ryder. During her marriage to Ryder, Stanley converted to Judaism.^[3]

Death[link]

Stanley died of uterine cancer while living in a Santa Fe, New Mexico, nursing home at the age of 76. She was survived by her first husband, Bruce Hall, her brother Justin, her three children, and several nephews and nieces. A biography, Female Brando: the Legend of Kim Stanley (2006), by Jon Krampner, was published by Back Stage Books, a division of Watson-Guptill.

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	Film portal
	Theatre portal
	Television portal

• List of American film actresses
• List of American television actresses

References[link]

External links[link]

• Kim Stanley at the Internet Broadway Database
• Kim Stanley at the Internet Movie Database
• Biographer Jon Krampner KimStanley.net Website
• Telegraph obituary
• Documentary film-in-progress THE NEEDS OF KIM STANLEY Kim Stanley at the Internet Movie Database

You may be looking for Martin Shaw (composer) or Martin Shaw (sociologist).

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2012)

Martin Shaw (born 21 January 1945) is an English actor. He is known for his roles in the television series The Professionals, The Chief, Judge John Deed and Inspector George Gently.

Theatrical background[link]

Shaw was born in Birmingham. According to him, his first stage appearance was at age three, during an amateur show in which his parents were performing. At Great Barr School, where musician Steve Winwood was a classmate, Shaw excelled in English literature and drama lessons. At sixteen, he was offered a scholarship to a Birmingham drama school. Declining the scholarship, he left school and, on the advice of his parents, he sought employment. One job was in the office of a brass foundry. At eighteen, Shaw moved to London to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He served his apprenticeship in repertory as an assistant stage manager at the Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch and the Bristol Old Vic.

Stage[link]

Shaw took key roles in the first revival of Look Back in Anger (Royal Court/Criterion, 1968); in the National Theatre's Saturday, Sunday, Monday opposite Laurence Olivier (1973); and in A Streetcar Named Desire presented by the Piccadilly Theatre in 1974. He later acknowledged the role of Stanley Kowalski in 'Streetcar' as a point of breakthrough in his career.

In the 1980s, Shaw played Elvis Presley in Alan Bleasdale's critically acclaimed Are You Lonesome Tonight?. It told the story of Elvis' last few hours. After a long run in London, the production visited Sydney and Melbourne in Australia.

Shaw's portrayal of Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband on Broadway earned him a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk award.

After filming finished on the TV series Judge John Deed, Shaw took the role of Thomas More in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. Shaw's daughter, Sophie, played opposite him as More's daughter, Margaret. The production toured Britain's cities before a run in London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Television[link]

Shaw began television work in 1967. Parts in one-off plays for Granada Television led to his playing hippy student Robert Croft, Lucile Hewitt's boyfriend, in Coronation Street.^[1] Another early role was booze and football-loving Welsh medical student Huw Evans in the television comedy series Doctor in the House. Huw Evans later returned in the Doctor at Large episode "Mother and Father Doing Well" as a nervous expectant father.

Shaw appeared with future co-star Lewis Collins in an episode of The New Avengers. Both played the roles of terrorists.^[1]

Shaw portrayed Ray Doyle ("Agent 4-5") in the British television series The Professionals (1977–1981). Shaw played another law-enforcement role in the 1990s ITV production The Chief.

In 1983, Shaw played Robert Falcon Scott in The Last Place on Earth. The series was filmed at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island, Canada. In interview at the time, Shaw commented that he generally responded well to the testing physical conditions, particularly when they enhanced the reality of the scene.

Rhodes is an eight part serial that aired in 1996 and was filmed on location in South Africa. Shaw's younger son, Joe, took early leave of his drama school course to play the part of the youthful Cecil Rhodes before Shaw completed Rhodes's story from the statesman's mature years to his death.

In 2001, he took the title role in the BBC drama Judge John Deed. The character gave an editorial voice to the television writer and producer G.F. Newman's ideas about lifestyle choices such as vegetarianism and alternative medicine as well as issues of social justice. One episode about the safety of the MMR vaccine was banned.

Between seasons of Judge John Deed, Shaw took the role of poetic bespectacled forensic detective Adam Dalgliesh in P.D. James's Death in Holy Orders in 2003 and The Murder Room in 2005.

After the sixth season of Judge John Deed had been filmed, Shaw appeared in the series Apparitions broadcast by the BBC in 2008. This was Shaw's first project as executive director.

In the police drama Inspector George Gently, Shaw appears in the title role.

Shaw also appeared as Sir Charles Cartwright in a 2009 adaptation of Agatha Christie's Poirot tale Three Act Tragedy.

Film[link]

Shaw's first film role was an Irish communist in Love on the Dole (1966). Better known is his 70s role of Banquo in Roman Polanski's Macbeth. Although Shaw is not classified as a film actor, he has an eclectic oeuvre of film roles, including an undercover Second World War operative in Operation Daybreak; a singing and dancing futuristic magician "Zax" in Facelift; and a wanted villain leading a life on the run in a circus troop in Ladder of Swords.

Narration and documentaries[link]

Shaw has narrated many audiobooks, including Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Silmarillion; Swift's Gulliver's Travels; and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

In 2006, Shaw narrated and appeared in a DVD chronicling the "Merlins over Malta" project. This featured the return of a World War II Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane from Britain to Malta for the first time in fifty years.

In December 2006, Shaw presented the six-part Discovery Channel Real Time TV series Martin Shaw: Aviators, produced by Twofour, which followed the two-year restoration of his Boeing Stearman biplane after it was crashed by another pilot at Old Buckenham airfield in Norfolk. Shaw fulfilled a lifetime ambition to take the controls of a Spitfire (owned by Maurice Bayliss) and, though take-off was not permitted, he also powered an English Electric Lightning (owned by Russell Carpenter) to 150 mph in three seconds along the runway at Cranfield Airport. Shaw also compared notes with the nonagenarian builder and developer of the modern autogyro, Wing Cdr. Ken Wallis.

In 2010 he presented a documentary for the BBC titled "Dambusters Declassified" in which he investigated and debunked some of the myths of the Dambusters raid story which had been portrayed in the books Enemy Coast Ahead and The Dambusters, and the film The Dambusters.

Advertisements and endorsements[link]

Among several voiceovers and appearances, in 1974, Shaw starred in a three-minute advertisement for the Mk II Ford Capri ^[2] and in 1987, a TV advert for the Vauxhall Cavalier.^[3]

In March 2012, he also announced that he would become the official patron to the community organisation Stop Norwich UrBanisation or SNUB, which is trying to protect Norfolk's countryside from over-development and excessive urbanisation. In the press release, he stated that he was "simply furious and upset by your plight and that of all of us who wish to live in quiet and peace. I will be your Patron and keep fighting".^[4]

Personal life[link]

His childhood was spent in Erdington and then Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham. In his youth, Shaw was involved in a drunken brawl with a friend, suffering broken teeth, injuries to his face and a fractured skull.^[5] A mid-face fracture involving the right cheekbone required surgical rebuilding.

In 1971, Shaw became a follower of Charan Singh, a master of the ancient spiritual tradition of Sant Mat.^[6] This involved a strict lacto vegetarian diet, meditation, yoga and the avoidance of alcohol and other mind-altering drugs.

He is a celebrity activist for animal rights and animal welfare. He is the patron of the Hillside Animal Sanctuary in Norfolk, a charity organisation that provides a safe home for neglected and abused animals.^[7] He also supports Viva!

In interviews and in the Martin Shaw - Aviators documentary series, Shaw readily shares his passion for vintage aeroplanes. He is the holder of a private pilot's licence. For several years, Shaw owned a 1943 Boeing Stearman PT-17 Kaydet (G-BAVO) and now flies a Piper Cub (G-BFBY).

Shaw has three children by his first wife, actress Jill Allen, whom he married in 1968: Luke Shaw, an actor; Joe Shaw, an actor and director; and Sophie Shaw, an actor and singer with the band "Blue Harlem".

Shaw's second wife was former nurse turned alternative therapist and core process psychotherapist, Maggie Mansfield.

Shaw's third wife was TV presenter, environmental activist and fellow pilot Vicky Kimm.

Between January 2003 and July 2008, Shaw and his current partner, Karen da Silva, were stalked by Sandra Price, a divorcee in her sixties. Price sent Shaw several letters (which he said he found "offensive and intrusive") as well as a 120-page dossier of her views on his career and a 45-minute cassette tape.

In the early hours of a morning in July 2008, Price poured petrol through the door of da Silva's home. This action precipitated Price's arrest by police. In a two-day trial at King's Lynn Magistrates' court (6–7 January 2009), Price pleaded guilty to damage to property. She was also convicted of harassment. Price was sentenced on 28 January.^{[citation needed]} Although she avoided a custodial sentence, she was ordered to perform 240 hours of unpaid community work and pay a contribution towards the Crown's costs of £800. An electronically monitored curfew between 7 am and 7 pm was imposed and the complainants received a restraining order against Price.

On 18 August 2010, Shaw collapsed during the first act of the matinee showing of A Country Girl at Shrewsbury's Theatre Severn. His agent, Roger Charteris, said he had been suffering from cracked ribs and was taking antibiotics for a severe chest infection. An understudy went on in his place.^[8]

Awards and nominations[link]

Shaw won two awards in 1996 for his performance as Lord Goring in the Broadway production of An Ideal Husband and was nominated for a third:

• Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play
• Winner of the Theatre World Special Award for Ensemble Performance
• Nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play

Television appearances[link]

Theatre appearances[link]

Film appearances[link]

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	England portal
	Film portal
	Television portal
	Theatre portal

• List of British actors and actresses
• List of people from Birmingham, England

References[link]

External links[link]

• Martin Shaw at the Internet Broadway Database
• Martin Shaw at the Internet Movie Database