Biagio Anthony Gazzarra was born in New York City, the son of Italian immigrants Angelina Cusumano and Antonio Gazzarra, a laborer and carpenter, each of Sicilian origin—Angelina from Castrofilippo and Antonio from Canicattì in the province of Agrigento. Gazzara grew up in New York’s Kips Bay neighborhood; he lived on East 29th Street and participated in the drama program at Madison Square Boys & Girls Club located across the street. He attended New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, but finally graduated from Saint Simon Stock in the Bronx. Years later, he said that the discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime during his teen years.
He went to City College of New York to study electrical engineering. After two years, he relented. He took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German director Erwin Piscator and afterward joined the Actors Studio.
He received acclaim for his off-Broadway performance in End as a Man in 1953. The production was transferred to Broadway and ran until 1954.
In 1954, Gazzara (having modified his original surname from “Gazzarra”) made several appearances on NBC’s legal drama Justice, based on case studies from the Legal Aid Society of New York. He also guest-starred on shows such as Medallion Theatre and The United States Steel Hour.
Gazzara became a Broadway sensation when he portrayed role of Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955–56) opposite Barbara Bel Geddes, directed by Elia Kazan. Gazzara turned down the role in the film version.[citation needed] The studio planned to offer the role to James Dean, but the part was given to Paul Newman after Dean’s death.
He followed it with another long run in A Hatful of Rain (1956).
He joined other Actors Studio members in the 1957 film The Strange One produced by Sam Spiegel.
His second film was a high-profile performance as a soldier on trial for avenging his wife’s rape in Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Gazzara became well known in several television series, beginning with Arrest and Trial, which ran from 1963 to 1964 on ABC.
He also appeared in the TV special A Carol for Another Christmas (1964) and had a short Broadway run in A Traveller without Luggage in 1964. He also guest-starred on Kraft Suspense Theatre.
He gained fame in the TV series Run for Your Life which ran from 1965 to 1968 on NBC, in which he played a terminally ill man trying to get the most out of the last two years of his life. For his work in the series, Gazzara received two Emmy nominations for “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series” and three Golden Globe nominations for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Drama.”
When the series ended Gazzara had a cameo in If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969) and a lead in the wartime action film The Bridge at Remagen (1969).
Some of the actor’s most formidable characters were those he created with his friend John Cassavetes in the 1970s. They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes’s film Husbands (1970), in which he appeared alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes.
Gazzara starred in a television movie, Pursuit (1972), the directorial debut of Michael Crichton. He also made the television movies When Michael Calls (1972), Fireball Forward (1972), and The Family Rico (1972).
He made The Sicilian Connection (1972) in Italy, and did a science fiction film The Neptune Factor (1973). There were more television films You’ll Never See Me Again (1973) and Maneater (1973).
He starred in the television miniseries QB VII (1974), which won six primetime Emmy Awards. The six-and-a-half-hour series was based on a book by Leon Uris and co-starred Anthony Hopkins. He then played gangster Al Capone in the biographical film Capone (1975). Cassevetes was in the support cast.
Gazzara appeared on Broadway in Hughie (1975) then worked again for Cassavetes as director in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), in which Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip-joint owner, Cosmo Vitelli. He starred in an action movie, High Velocity (1976), and was one of many stars in Voyage of the Damned (1976).
Gazzara returned to Broadway for a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Colleen Dewhurst in 1976.
A year later, he starred in yet another Cassavetes-directed movie, Opening Night, as stage director Manny Victor, who struggles with the mentally unstable star of his show, played by Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands. He made an acclaimed TV movie The Death of Richie (1977).
Gazzara’s career received a boost when Peter Bogdanovich cast him in the title role of Saint Jack (1979). His increased profile helped him be cast in the male lead of Bloodline (1979) and the Korean War epic Inchon (1980) co-starring Laurence Olivier and Richard Roundtree.
Gazzara appeared in 38 films, many for television, in the 1990s. He worked with a number of renowned directors, such as the Coen brothers (The Big Lebowski), Spike Lee (Summer of Sam), David Mamet (The Spanish Prisoner), Walter Hugo Khouri (Forever), Vincent Gallo (Buffalo ’66), Todd Solondz (Happiness), John Turturro (Illuminata), and John McTiernan (The Thomas Crown Affair).
In addition to acting, Gazzara worked as an occasional television director; his credits include the Columbo episodes A Friend in Deed (1974) and Troubled Waters (1975). Gazzara was nominated three times for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play—in 1956 for A Hatful of Rain, in 1975 for the paired short plays Hughie and Duet, and in 1977 for a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite Colleen Dewhurst.
Gazzara was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1999. He suffered a stroke in 2005. On February 3, 2012, he died of pancreatic cancer at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York.