I’m not great at covering people’s deaths, mainly because when I do, I can’t resist posting my favorite thing that that person was ever tenuously connected to rather than focusing on the person himself. Such is the case with Ben Gazzara, the actor who played Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski. He died of pancreatic cancer last week at age 81, and this banner image is my favorite close-up in all of cinema.
Mr. Gazzara studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where the careers of stars like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a visceral presence. It earned him regular work across half a century, not only onstage — his last Broadway appearance was in the revival of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s series “Run for Your Life.” If Mr. Gazzara never achieved Brando’s stature, that was partly because of a certain laissez-faire approach to his career: an early suspicion of film, a reluctance to go after desirable roles. “When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said in a 1998 interview on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t tell you the pictures I turned down because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was a fool.”treated objects like women, man.
He treated objects like women, man. The eulogy writes itself.
[Read the NYTimes’ much more appropriate piece here]