47 Facts About John Cassavetes

John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor and filmmaker.

John Cassavetes began as a television and film actor before helping to pioneer modern American independent cinema as a director and writer, often financing and distributing his films with his own income.

John Cassavetes began his directing career with the 1959 independent feature Shadows and followed with independent productions such as Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, and Love Streams.

John Cassavetes's films employed an actor-centered approach which prioritized raw character relationships and "small feelings" while rejecting traditional Hollywood storytelling, method acting, and stylization.

John Cassavetes's films became associated with an improvisational, cinema verite aesthetic.

John Cassavetes collaborated frequently with a rotating group of actors and crew members, including his wife Gena Rowlands and friends Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Seymour Cassel.

Cassavetes was born in New York City, the son of Greek American actress Katherine Cassavetes, who was to be featured in some of his films, and Greek immigrant Nicholas John Cassavetes, who was born in Larissa to Aromanian parents from the village of Vrysochori.

John Cassavetes attended Port Washington High School from 1945 to 1947 and participated in Port Weekly, Red Domino, football, and the Port Light.

John Cassavetes attended Blair Academy in New Jersey and spent a semester at Plattsburgh, New York's Champlain College before being expelled due to his failing grades.

John Cassavetes spent a few weeks hitchhiking to Florida and then transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, encouraged by recently enrolled friends who told him the school was "packed with girls".

John Cassavetes graduated in 1950 and met his future wife Gena Rowlands at her audition to enter the Academy in 1953.

John Cassavetes continued acting in the theater, took small parts in films, and began working on television in anthology series such as Alcoa Theatre.

John Cassavetes particularly scorned Lee Strasberg's Method-based Actors Studio, believing that the Method was "more a form of psychotherapy than of acting" which resulted in sentimental cliches and self-indulgent emotion.

Shortly after opening the workshop, John Cassavetes was invited to audition at the Actors Studio, and he and Lane devised a prank: they claimed to be performing a scene from a recent stage production but in fact improvised a performance on the spot, fooling an impressed Strasberg.

John Cassavetes then fabricated a story about his financial troubles, prompting Strasberg to offer him a full scholarship to the Studio; John Cassavetes immediately rejected it, feeling that Strasberg did not know anything about acting if he had been so easily fooled by the two ruses.

John Cassavetes raised the funds for the production from friends and family, as well as listeners to Jean Shepherd's late-night radio talk-show Night People.

John Cassavetes was unable to gain American distribution of Shadows, but it won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival.

John Cassavetes's first starring role in a feature film was Edge of the City, which co-starred Sidney Poitier.

John Cassavetes would appear on the NBC interview program, Here's Hollywood.

John Cassavetes starred in the CBS western series Rawhide, in the episode "Incident Near Gloomy River".

John Cassavetes portrayed the murderer in a 1972 episode of the TV crime series Columbo, titled "Etude in Black".

Around this time, John Cassavetes formed "Faces International" as a distribution company to handle all of his films.

In 1970, John Cassavetes directed and acted in Husbands, with actors Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara.

John Cassavetes stated that this was a personal film for him; his elder brother had died at the age of 30.

Rowlands received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, while John Cassavetes was nominated for Best Director.

John Cassavetes directed the film Gloria, featuring Rowlands as a Mob moll who tries to protect an orphan boy whom the Mob wants to kill, which earned her another Best Actress nomination.

In 1982, John Cassavetes starred in Paul Mazursky's Tempest, which co-starred Rowlands, Susan Sarandon, Molly Ringwald, Raul Julia and Vittorio Gassman.

John Cassavetes penned the stage play Knives, the earliest version of which he allowed to be published in the 1978 premiere issue of On Stage, the quarterly magazine of the American Community Theatre Association, a division of the American Theatre Association.

John Cassavetes made the Cannon Films-financed Love Streams, which featured him as an aging playboy who suffers the overbearing affection of his recently divorced sister.

John Cassavetes despised the film Big Trouble, which he took over during filming from Andrew Bergman, who wrote the original screenplay.

John Cassavetes came to refer to the film as "The aptly titled 'Big Trouble,'" since the studio vetoed many of his decisions for the film and eventually edited most of it in a way with which John Cassavetes disagreed.

In January 1987, John Cassavetes was facing health problems, but he wrote the three-act play Woman of Mystery and brought it to the stage in May and June at the Court Theatre, Los Angeles.

John Cassavetes worked during the last year of his life to produce a last film that was to be titled She's Delovely.

John Cassavetes was in talks with Sean Penn to star, though legal and financial hurdles proved insurmountable and the project was forgotten about until after Cassavetes's death, when his son Nick finally directed it as She's So Lovely.

John Cassavetes is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery in Los Angeles.

At the time of his death, John Cassavetes had amassed a collection of more than 40 unproduced screenplays, as well as a novel, Husbands.

John Cassavetes left three unproduced plays: Sweet Talk, Entrances and Exits and Begin the Beguine, the last of which, in German translation, was co-produced by Needcompany of Belgium and Burgtheater of Vienna, and premiered on stage at Vienna's Akademietheater in 2014.

John Cassavetes on John Cassavetes is a collection of interviews collected or conducted by Boston University film scholar Ray Carney, in which the filmmaker recalled his experiences, influences and outlook on the film industry.

Many of John Cassavetes's films are owned by Faces Distribution, a company overseen by Gena Rowlands and Julian Schlossberg, distributed by Jumer Films, with additional sales and distribution by Janus Films.

Alexandra John Cassavetes directed the documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession in 2004, and in 2006 served as 2nd Unit Director on her brother Nick's film, Alpha Dog.

John Cassavetes often presented difficult characters whose behaviors were not easily understood, rejecting simplistic psychological or narrative explanations for their actions.

John Cassavetes disregarded the "impressionistic cinematography, linear editing, and star-centred scene making" fashionable in Hollywood and art films.

John Cassavetes rejected the dominance of the director's singular vision, instead believing each character must be the actor's "individual creation" and refusing to explain the characters to his actors in any significant detail.

The manner in which John Cassavetes employed improvisation is frequently misunderstood: with the exception of the original version of Shadows, his films were tightly scripted.

John Cassavetes mortgaged his house to acquire the funds to shoot A Woman Under the Influence, instead of seeking money from an investor who might try to change the script so as to make the film more marketable.

John Cassavetes worked with Bo Harwood from 1970 to 1984 on six films in several different capacities, even though Harwood initially only signed on to do "a little editing" for Husbands, and "a little sound editing" for Minnie and Moskowitz.

Harwood composed poignant music for John Cassavetes's following three films, and was credited as "Sound" for two of them.