Ben Gazzara

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 himself. In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip-joint owner, Cosmo Vitelli. 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. Also during this period he appeared in the television miniseries QB VII (1974), and the films Capone (1975), Voyage of the Damned (1976), High Velocity (1976), and Saint Jack (1979).

In the 1980s, Gazzara appeared in several movies such as Inchon co-starring Laurence Olivier and Richard Roundtree, They All Laughed (directed by Peter Bogdanovich), and in a villainous role in the oft-televised Patrick Swayze film Road House, which the actor jokingly said is probably his most-watched performance. He starred with Rowlands in the critically acclaimed AIDS-themed TV movie An Early Frost (1985), for which he received his third Emmy nomination. Read Less