(The actor-director's third autobiographical volume covers...)
The actor-director's third autobiographical volume covers the years 1955-1974 during which Houseman served as artistic director of the American Shakespeare Festival and director of the drama division of Juilliard and created the role of Professor Kingsfield.
(In Unfinished Business, the 1500 pages of his three earli...)
In Unfinished Business, the 1500 pages of his three earlier memoirs, Run-Through, Front and Center and Final Dress have been distilled into one astonishing volume, with fresh revelations throughout and a riveting new final chapter which brings the Houseman saga to a close.
John Houseman was a Romanian-born British-American actor, producer, director and author, who became famous after his role as Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in the film ''The Paper Chase'' and its subsequent television series.
Background
Ethnicity:
His mother was of Welsh and Irish descent, his father was an Alsatian-born Jew.
John Houseman was born Jacques Haussmann on September 22, 1902, in Bucharest, Romania. He was the son of May (née Davies) and Georges Haussmann. His father was a prosperous grain broker, and because of this Houseman spent much of his childhood in hotel suites in the great cities of Europe. The experience left him with fluency in four languages (French, German, Romanian, English) and an intimate knowledge of the grain brokerage business.
Education
Houseman received his education in England at Clifton College.
During his career, Houseman received honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Temple University, Boston University, Gettysburg University, Hofstra University, John Hopkins University, Pratt Institute, Union College, and the University of Southern California, all in 1985.
After sowing his wild oats in Argentina for eighteen months — Houseman spent part of his time there as a cattle wrangler — Houseman followed his father’s footsteps into the family business. He began in a London brokerage house, but immigrated to New York City in 1924 to ply his trade there. By all accounts, he was prosperous but lost his livelihood during the stock market crash of 1929.
Houseman cast about for a new occupation and his first wife, an actress, suggested that he might try his hand at theatrical pursuits, something he had been interested in during his college years. Houseman had written short stories before—several stories about his Argentinean experiences had been published in a British magazine. He had also translated French and German plays as a hobby in the late 1920s.
Producing and directing plays on and off-Broadway, Houseman’s big break came with his 1934 direction of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, featuring an all-black cast. Several other directing assignments followed over the next year or so, including Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea and Maxwell Anderson’s Valley Forge.
For his 1935 staging of Archibald MacLeish’s verse Play Panic, Houseman cast in the lead role a fast-rising nineteen-year-old actor by the name of Orson Welles.
Houseman became the director in 1935 of the Negro Theatre Project, part of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project. He took Welles with him and together they produced the works of African American playwrights and classical plays in unusual stagings. The most successful of these, with Houseman producing and Welles directing, was a production of MacBeth with a setting transferred from traditional Scotland to nineteenth century-Haiti, hiring actual witch doctors to play the “weird sisters” of the play. Houseman and Welles continued on until late 1937 with the project, and with another WPA project devoted to the production of classical theatre.
Houseman and Welles both resigned in 1937 and formed their own company, the Mercury Theatre. Their seminal production was a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar that played to packed houses its entire run. Other successful stagings followed— George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday, and Georg Bruchner’s Danton’s Death.
As a spinoff project, Houseman and Welles wrote and produced The Mercury Radio Theatre of the Air, a series that dramatized literary classics such as Heart of Darkness, Dracula, and A Tale of Two Cities. Their 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, written in the style of a news broadcast and placing the first Martian landing in modern-day Grovers Mill, New Jersey, was so compelling that some listeners actually believed that Martians were attacking. Widespread panic ensued in some towns. One anecdote from the time relates that network executives tried to pull the plug on the broadcast halfway through, but that Housemann blocked them bodily from entering the broadcast studio. Houseman and Welles were both strong-willed men, and relations were often strained. Houseman collaborated with Welles early on in the making of the 1941 Citizen Kane—agreed upon by most film critics to be one of the greatest films ever made—but they had their final falling out around this time and Houseman is not credited in the film.
On the cusp of World War II Houseman was offered the assignment of running the newly formed Voice of America organization, a government service—under the auspices of the U.S. Army—charged with programming and broadcasting radio programs into countries under siege of battle or persecution. When Houseman arrived the service had no equipment and no programming, but by the end of 1942, a staff of three thousand people in New York was broadcasting nearly one thousand shows a day in twenty-seven languages. Houseman quit the organization in 1943 when a squabble between the State Department and the Army over his immigrant status kept Houseman from travelling to VOA operations in London.
Hollywood beckoned, and Houseman heeded its siren song. Over the next two decades, he produced eighteen movies for a handful of studios. Some of them were critically acclaimed films—the film noir Blue Dahlia of 1946, the romantic melodrama Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1948, the suspenseful crime drama They Live by Night of 1949, the star vehicle (for James Mason, Marlon Brando, and John Gielgud, among others), Julius Caesar of 1949, and the biopic of Vincent Van Gogh Lust for Life of 1956, to name a few. His 1952 film about Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful, won five Academy Awards, including one for best screenplay. Houseman also produced for television the highly influential The Seven Lively Arts, a performance showcase, and Playhouse 90, an anthology series of original plays.
Ever restless, Houseman pursued a full slate of side activities. He presided over the creation of and—from 1956 to 1959—he acted as artistic director to the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. In 1965 the Julliard School for the performing arts asked Houseman to build up its drama department. Out of his work for Juilliard eventually grew the Acting Company, a touring repertory theatre where actors like Patti Lupone, Kevin Kline, Christopher Reeves, William Hurt, and Robin Williams cut their theatrical teeth. Then, almost as a lark, Houseman began a successful acting career in 1974. He had acted in a few bit parts before, but when James Mason dropped out of The Paper Chase, a drama about law school, Houseman stepped in as a last-minute replacement. He reprised his Paper Chase role in the short-lived television series of the same name and made some three dozen appearances in film and television roles up until his death in 1988.
On October 31, 1988, Houseman died at age 86 of spinal cancer at his home in Malibu, California.
Academy Award-winning actor John Houseman's main contribution to American culture was not his own performances on film but rather, his role as a midwife to one of the greatest actor-directors-cinematic geniuses his adopted country ever produced (Orson Welles) and as a midwife to a whole generation of actors as head of the drama division of the Juilliard School. However, as an actor, he was best known for his role as Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in the film The Paper Chase (1973), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He then reprised his role as Kingsfield in the 1978 television series adaptation.
Houseman was also known for his commercials for the brokerage firm Smith Barney. He had a distinctive English accent, a product of his schooling.
Houseman was portrayed by Cary Elwes in the Tim Robbins-directed film Cradle Will Rock (1999). Actor Eddie Marsan plays the role of Houseman in Richard Linklater's film Me & Orson Welles (2009). Houseman was played by actor Jonathan Rigby in the Doctor Who audio drama Invaders from Mars set around the War of the Worlds broadcast.
Houseman wrote that he frequently worked with members of the Communist Party, although he never joined the party himself. He emerged relatively unscathed from the blacklists of the late 40's and 50's in which many cultural figures could not find work because of their political views.
Personality
Houseman personally was warm, friendly and not at all the curmudgeonly character he had created.
Connections
Houseman married Joan Courtney in 1950. She and their two sons, John Michael, an anthropologist, and Charles Sebastian, an artist, survived him. An earlier marriage to Zita Johann in 1929, an actress, ended in divorce.
