John Cassavetes

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Because his films are honest, pure, and perfectly flawed. Hailed, mostly in retrospect, as the spiritual father of American independent film-making (all that remains of it).

WHAT SORT OF FILMS IS HE FAMOUS FOR?
As an actor he is best known for his appearances in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Mikey and Nicky (1976). As his directorial career took off he became more complacent about his acting, often getting into explosive confrontations with other directors, seeing it as a means to an end in order to finance his own personal projects. Along with Orson Welles, he set a precedent for taking large sums of money for acting in Hollywood genre movies and ploughing the cash straight into his own unique, non-mainstream style of cinema.

WHEN WAS HE WORKING?
Born in 1929, Cassavetes began his career with supporting roles in Edge of the City (1956) and Crime in the Streets (1956) before landing the title role in Johnny Staccato, a detective show about a jazz loving private eye, which helped pay the bills on his freewheeling directorial debut Shadows (1959). After two compromised studio pictures (Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child is Waiting (1963)), the long in gestation Faces (1968) earned him kudos at the New York Film Festival. A run of half a dozen masterworks followed, from Husbands (1970) to Love Streams (1984). He died in February 1989 from cirrhosis of the liver.

WHO DID HE WORK WITH?
He befriended Ben Gazarra and Peter Falk specifically so that their buddy relationship would have more credibility during the shooting of Husbands, and worked constantly with them both from then on.
Likewise he would help out Seymour Cassel, one of his closest friends, getting him bit parts on movies he was appearing in, such as Don Siegels The Killers (1964), hiring him as his assistant, before finally writing Minnie and Moskovitz (1971) specifically for him.
Cassavetes cast himself in four of his movies, and his wife Gena Rowlands in seven, most notably Opening Night (1977) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which would gain her an Oscar nomination.