45 Facts About John Garfield

John Garfield received Academy Award nominations for his performances in Four Daughters and Body and Soul.

John Garfield died two years later, and the young boys were sent to live with various relatives, all poor, scattered across the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx.

Several of these relatives lived in tenements in a section of East Brooklyn called Brownsville, and there, John Garfield lived in one house and slept in another.

John Garfield's father remarried and moved to the West Bronx, where Garfield joined a series of gangs.

John Garfield began to hang out and eventually spar at a boxing gym on Jerome Avenue.

John Garfield gave him acting exercises and made him memorize and deliver speeches in front of the class and, as he progressed, in front of school assemblies.

John Garfield encouraged him to sign up for a citywide debating competition sponsored by The New York Times.

John Garfield received feature billing in his next role, that of Henry the office boy in Elmer Rice's play Counsellor-at-Law, starring Paul Muni.

At this point, Warner's expressed an interest in John Garfield and sought a screen test.

Odets was the man of the moment, and he claimed to the press that John Garfield was his "find" and that he would soon write a play just for him.

That play would turn out to be Golden Boy, but when Luther Adler was cast in the lead role instead, a disillusioned John Garfield began to take a second look at the overtures being made by Hollywood.

Elia Kazan's reaction was different, suggesting that the Group did not so much fear that John Garfield would fail, but that he would succeed.

John Garfield's debut had a cinematic impact difficult to conceive in retrospect.

John Garfield didn't recite dialogue, he attacked it until it lost the quality of talk and took on the nature of speech.

The result was often a series of suspensions, with John Garfield refusing an assigned role and Warners refusing to pay him.

John Garfield's problem was shared by any actor working in the studio system of the 1930s: by contract, the studio had the right to cast him in any project they wanted to.

At the onset of World War II, John Garfield immediately attempted to enlist in the armed forces, but was turned down because of his heart condition.

John Garfield traveled overseas to help entertain the troops, made several bond selling tours and starred in a string of patriotic box-office successes like Air Force, Destination Tokyo and Pride of the Marines.

John Garfield was particularly proud of the last film, based on the life of Al Schmid, a war hero blinded in combat.

In preparing for the role, John Garfield lived for several weeks with Schmid and his wife in Philadelphia and would blindfold himself for hours at a time.

In Gentleman's Agreement, John Garfield took a featured, but supporting, part because he believed deeply in the film's expose of antisemitism in America.

John Garfield was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring role in Body and Soul.

That same year, John Garfield returned to Broadway in the play Skipper Next to God.

Strong-willed and often verbally combative, John Garfield did not hesitate to venture out on his own when the opportunity arose.

Long involved in liberal politics, John Garfield was caught up in the communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

John Garfield supported the Committee for the First Amendment, which opposed governmental investigation of communist activity in Hollywood.

When called to testify in 1951 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was empowered to investigate communist infiltration in America, John Garfield refused to name Communist Party members or followers, testifying that, indeed, he knew none in the film industry.

John Garfield rejected communism and, just prior to his death in hopes of redeeming himself in the eyes of the blacklisters, wrote that he had been duped by communist ideology in an unpublished article called "I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook", a reference to John Garfield's movies about boxing.

John Garfield was blacklisted in Red Channels and barred from future employment as an actor by Hollywood movie studio bosses for the remainder of his career.

John Garfield then arranged to meet with the FBI to press his case.

John Garfield instead responded with an angry expletive and walked out of the meeting.

On May 9,1952, John Garfield moved out of his New York apartment for the last time, indicating to friends that the separation from his wife Roberta was not temporary.

John Garfield confided to columnist Earl Wilson that he would soon be divorced.

John Garfield heard that a HUAC investigator was reviewing his testimony for possible perjury charges.

John Garfield's agent reported that 20th Century-Fox wanted him for a film called Taxi but would not even begin talks unless the investigation concluded in his favor.

John Garfield met actress Iris Whitney for dinner and afterward became ill, complaining that he felt chilled.

John Garfield took him to her apartment, where he refused to let her call a doctor and instead went to bed.

John Garfield's estate, valued at "more than $100,000," was left entirely to his wife.

Shortly afterward, the HUAC closed its investigation of John Garfield, leaving him in the clear.

John Garfield was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester County, New York.

John Garfield's wife had been a member of the Communist Party.

John Garfield was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Four Daughters in 1939 and Best Actor for Body and Soul in 1948.

John Garfield was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7065 Hollywood Boulevard.

The John Prine song "The Late John Garfield Blues" is inspired by Garfield.

John Garfield is a character in Names, Mark Kemble's play about former Group Theatre members' struggles with the House Un-American Activities Committee.