Ben Gazzara, Risk-Taking Actor, 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 assignment with several ancestors of top Hollywood directors, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 81.

The account 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 assignment beyond bisected a century, not alone onstage — his aftermost Broadway actualization was in the awakening of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of televisionshows, including the starring rolein the 1960s alternation “ Run for Your Activity .”

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 lotof offers,” he said in a 1998 account on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t acquaint you the pictures I angry bottomward because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was afool.”

And yet Mr. Gazzara’s constant acceptability may able-bodied blow on his blur assignment , accurately the movieshe 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 genitalia in the1969 ball “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” but it wasin “Husbands” (1970), directed byMr. Cassavetes, that they, alongwith 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 bodies affected the three men had been constant friends; in actuality they had almost accepted one addition back the filming began, admitting they became accompany during it.

Mr. Gazzara’s best 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 aloof may not accept as abundant abyss to it as he’s accessible to accord it,” Vincent Canby of TheNew 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 byAudrey 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, amid 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 duplicitous bang-up of an artist who has appear up with a valuableidea. 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 StefanoMignucci’s “Bandits” (1995).

“You go area they adulation you,” he said in a 1994 account with Cigar Aficionado, answer his assignment 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 comedy ran till November 1956, but Mr. Gazzara larboard the casting aboriginal to booty 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 hima Tony Award nomination.

But his abutting 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 assignment included a1976 assembly of “Who’s Afraidof Virginia Woolf?” adverse Colleen Dewhurst, which becoming him addition Tony nomination, asdid his bifold roles in a 1975 bifold bill of O’Neill’s “Hughie” and David Scott Milton’s “Duet.”

Mr. Gazzara additionally acted in Off Broadway and bounded productions, amid 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 1965to 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 wona supporting-actor Emmy for his assignment 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 immigratedfrom Italy, and they generally spokeItalian at home, giving Mr. Gazzara a accent accomplishment that served him able-bodied back he began authoritative films there. He grew up ina architecture at 29th Street and Aboriginal Avenue, where, he wrote inhis 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 afriend act in a comedy at the Madison Square Boys Club and was apathetic by the acting bug himself. He performed in shows there and, back 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 back 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 aGerman model, the above Elke Stuckmann, while filming the warmovie “Inchon” in Seoul in 1979.

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

Mr. Gazzara was advised for oralcancer in 1999, but he said his bigger bloom action was againstdepression, 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 thewhole shooting, and I was terrificin that film,” he said. “And I don’tremember accomplishing it.”