16 Facts About Jules Irving

Jules Irving had started the Workshop with fellow New Yorker Herbert Blau, whom he knew from undergraduate days at New York University and then during graduate study at Stanford University.

Jules Irving was active in school shows and made his Broadway debut at the age of thirteen in George S Kaufman's The American Way.

Jules Irving joined the army in 1943, serving in the infantry during the Battle of the Bulge and as a Russian translator when his unit met Soviet forces.

Jules Irving guided the theater's finances and led primary day-by-day operations of the company's growth to its Elgin Street playhouse and then to offices on Folsom Street and two year-round theaters, the Encore and the Marines' Memorial.

Jules Irving had the option to renew its lease on the Marines' Memorial Theater but no money.

Jules Irving was informed that the Workshop would need to fund its own travel to get to Belgium.

Jules Irving was thus extremely cautious in the late 1950s when the Ford Foundation offered its hand.

Over time Jules Irving developed a relationship with the Foundation as a consultant who advised fledgling theaters on survival and growth throughout the nation.

Jules Irving steadily built the repertory company for the next seven years, concentrating mainly on his responsibilities and leadership as producer after personally directing some of the strongest early productions, including the powerful 1966 Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Jules Irving ended his regime at Lincoln Center in 1972 with Ellis Rabb's widely celebrated direction of Maxim Gorky's Enemies with a cast that included several actors who had come with Irving years earlier from San Francisco.

Jules Irving concluded a little over three decades in live theater when he left Lincoln Center.

Pointer, long a major actress with the Actor's Workshop and Lincoln Center, found opportunity in film roles, and where their daughter Amy Jules Irving, who began her acting career at age nine on the Workshop stage, would carry on the family name.

Jules Irving produced television revivals of classic films, including Dark Victory, and directed Loose Change and the series, Rich Man, Poor Man.

In 1947, Jules Irving married actress Priscilla Pointer, to whom he remained married until his death in 1979.

Pointer remarried a year later in 1980 to Robert Symonds, who had been Jules Irving's producing partner at Lincoln Center.

Jules Irving died of a heart attack in 1979 on a vacation trip to Reno, Nevada, aged 54.