23 Facts About Jack Garfein

Jakob Garfein was an American film and theatre director, acting teacher, and a key figure of the Actors Studio.

Jack Garfein put on its first-ever play to move to Broadway, End as a Man, and expanded the influence of Method Acting to Hollywood with the founding of Actors Studio West, alongside Paul Newman, in 1966.

Jack Garfein was a teacher to actors Sissy Spacek, Ron Perlman, Irene Jacob, James Thierree, Laetitia Casta, and Samuel Le Bihan.

Jack Garfein directed Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Shelley Winters, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Ralph Meeker, Mark Richman, Mildred Dunnock, and Elaine Stritch, and discovered Steve McQueen, Bruce Dern, George Peppard, Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Albert Salmi, and Paul Richards.

Jack Garfein gave James Dean his first acting role in End as a Man.

In 1943, Jack Garfein was smuggled to Hungary with his mother and younger sister, Hadi, where they hid with relatives until their deportation to Auschwitz in 1944.

Jack Garfein was then taken care of by the Jewish Child Care Association, which helped him secure a scholarship in 1947 to study at the Dramatic Workshop at The New School for Social Research.

Jack Garfein took classes in acting with the influential German director Erwin Piscator.

The play revealed Ben Gazzara as an up-and-coming actor, and at the age of 23, Jack Garfein won the Show Business Award as the best director on Broadway.

In June 1955, Jack Garfein received a letter informing him he had been invited by the board of directors to become a member of the Actors Studio.

Baker and Jack Garfein had one daughter, Emmy Award-winning actress Blanche Baker, and a son, Grammy-Award-winning composer Herschel Jack Garfein.

Jack Garfein was the founder and artistic director of the Samuel Beckett Theater in New York City, as well as the Harold Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row.

In 2013, Jack Garfein adapted and directed Franz Kafka's "A Report to the Academy" at the Theatre des Mathurins in Paris.

Jack Garfein refused to bow down and filmed the scene anyway.

In 1951, Jack Garfein was offered his first job in television, directing short dramatic sketches for The Kate Smith Hour.

Several years later, Jack Garfein directed an episode of the first prime time network color television series The Marriage, which aired on NBC from July to August 1954.

One of a select group of non-performers awarded membership in The Actors Studio, Jack Garfein became director of the Studio's Los Angeles branch founded in 1966, and created The Harold Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row in New York City.

Jack Garfein has written Life and Acting - Techniques for the Actor.

One of a select group of non-performers awarded membership in The Actors Studio, Jack Garfein became director of the Studio's Los Angeles branch, which he had co-founded with Paul Newman in 1966.

Jack Garfein opened the Actors and Directors Lab in New York in 1974, a drama school where several well-known figures studied, including Sissy Spacek, Paul Schrader, Tom Schulman, and Phil Alden Robinson.

In July 2012, Jack Garfein was awarded the Masque d'Or and voted best acting teacher in France.

Jack Garfein was a close friend of Marilyn Monroe, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and Lee Strasberg, whom Garfein considered as a kind of adoptive father because he had lived with the Strasbergs during his early years studying theater in the US.

In 2010, a tribute to Jack Garfein was presented in Los Angeles by the UCLA Film and Television Archive at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater, which featured screenings of his two films, as well as Brian McKenna's documentary A Journey Back, which chronicles Jack Garfein as he revisits Auschwitz and returns to his childhood home.