Jack Garfein, director from Actors Studio’s heyday, dies at 89
Jack Garfein, a Holocaust survivor who became a noted director, producer and acting teacher, working with some of the greatest actors and playwrights of his era, died Dec. 30 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 89.
His family said the cause was leukemia.
Garfein was at the heart of the Actors Studio in Manhattan in the 1950s, when it was staging attentiongetting work based on the method-acting principles of Konstantin Stanislavski.
“Garfein was one of the last surviving early members of the Studio,” the film and theater historian Foster Hirsch said by email, adding that he “in effect had become a historian of the Studio’s earliest and most illustrious period.”
He first drew wide notice as the director of “End as a Man,” Calder Willingham’s adaptation of his own novel about harsh life in a Southern military academy. The play, which featured Ben Gazzara in his breakout role, opened in the West Village and then moved to Broadway. Garfein, seven years after arriving in New York speaking no English, was only 23.
It was a remarkably fast start to a career that went on to include five more Broadway credits as director or producer, countless off-Broadway productions and a major role in establishing a West Coast branch of the Actors Studio in 1966.
Garfein, working on both coasts and having advanced the early careers of Gazzara, George Peppard, Steve McQueen and other stars, also might have been expected to have a substantial film résumé. But he never got much of a foothold in that world, directing only two movies, “The Strange One” in 1957 (an adaptation of “End as a Man”) and “Something Wild” in 1961.
The reason was no secret: He clashed with certain Hollywood titans, including producer Sam Spiegel, at a time when that was enough to end a movie career. But in a 2011 interview, Garfein, whose whole family died in the Holocaust and who barely survived the concentration camps himself, shrugged off the blackballing.
“I’ve been bullied by bigger people than them,” he said.
Jakob Garfein was born July 2, 1930, in Mukachevo, then part of Czechoslovakia and now part of Ukraine. His father, Hermann, was an executive at the family sawmill, and his mother, Blanka (Spiegel) Garfein, was a homemaker. With the Nazis threatening the country in the late 1930s, the family fled to Hungary, but in 1944 the Nazis occupied that nation as well and the family was deported to Auschwitz.
Later, he recalled the prisoners being divided into two lines: one for men and boys 16 and older, one for women and children. Although he was only 13, his mother shoved him into the men’s line. At the time he took that as rejection, but in hindsight he realized it was her way of saving him.
In the line, another unexpected turn helped him survive. Infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele himself was reviewing the male prisoners. After young Jakob gave his age as 16, a skeptical pause hung in the air until the stranger next to him in line, an old man, said Garfein was his apprentice and both were master mosaic artists. That got them sent to the forced-labor group rather than to the gas chamber.
“This god came down in the guise of an old man,” Garfein said in “A Journey Back,” a 2010 documentary about his return to Auschwitz, “because I never saw that old man again.”
Garfein said he was shuttled among 11 different camps. At the end of the war in 1945, he was taken with other survivors to Sweden, where a museum had been converted into a hospital and recuperation center.
There some of the survivors presented a stage performance for their hosts, reenacting scenes from life in the labor camps. He was cast as a cabin boy, serving a capo, a Jewish prisoner in a low-level administrative position. In the performance, the man playing the capo unexpectedly lighted a cigarette, took a few puffs, then flipped it aside, and Garfein reacted instinctively. “Without a second’s hesitation, I was on my feet running with the speed of a leopard toward a fallen prey,” he wrote in “Life and Acting: Techniques for the Actor” (2010), a combination memoir and textbook.
“I felt myself back at the camp,” he continued, “where a cigarette stub had the value of a perfectly cut diamond. Even the fetid odor of the camp and the hunger pains around my stomach became as they had once been.”