John Garfield

John Garfield, born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on March 4, 1913, in a small apartment on Rivington Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, was an American stage and screen actor whose Broadway career spanned from 1932 to 1952. The son of David and Hannah Garfinkle, Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in the heart of New York City's Yiddish Theater District. Those close to him throughout his life knew him by the nickname Julie. His mother died when he was young, and he and his brother Max were subsequently sent to live with various relatives scattered across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, many of them residing in tenements in the Brownsville section of East Brooklyn.

His early years were marked by poverty, gang involvement, and irregular schooling. After being expelled three times, he was enrolled at P.S. 45, a school for difficult children, where principal Angelo Patri recognized his potential and directed him toward speech therapy classes taught by Margaret O'Ryan. O'Ryan gave him acting exercises, cast him in school plays, and encouraged him to enter a citywide debating competition sponsored by The New York Times, in which he took second prize. With Patri and O'Ryan's support, he began taking acting lessons at a drama school affiliated with the Heckscher Foundation. At one of those productions, the Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami offered him encouragement and recommended him to the American Laboratory Theatre, funded by the Theatre Guild, where Richard Boleslavski staged experimental productions and Maria Ouspenskaya supervised acting classes. Both were former members of the Moscow Art Theatre and among the first proponents of Konstantin Stanislavski's system in the United States. Garfield audited rehearsals, built and painted scenery, and did crew work at the Lab, later describing this period as the beginning of his theatrical apprenticeship. Among those also gravitating toward the Lab at that time were Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Franchot Tone, Cheryl Crawford, and Harold Clurman, all of whom would later figure in his career.

Following a stint with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater and a period of vagrancy that included hitchhiking, freight hopping, fruit picking, and logging in the Pacific Northwest, Garfield made his Broadway debut in 1932 in Lost Boy, a production that ran for only two weeks but provided him with his first professional stage credit. His next role brought him feature billing as Henry the office boy in Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law, starring Paul Muni, which ran for three months, toured the East, and returned for a second engagement. Warner Bros. expressed interest in him at that point and sought a screen test, but he declined.

Garfield lobbied persistently to join the Group Theatre, the collective launched by Crawford, Clurman, and Strasberg. After months of rejection, Crawford noticed him waiting at the Broadhurst Theater and recommended him to the other directors. His entry into the Group came through Clifford Odets, a close friend from his Bronx years, who insisted Garfield be cast as Ralph in Awake and Sing, which opened in February 1935. Critic Brooks Atkinson singled him out for his character work, and he was subsequently voted full membership in the company. Odets had promised to write a play specifically for him, and that play proved to be Golden Boy, though Luther Adler was ultimately cast in the lead role. Garfield appeared in Golden Boy on Broadway, as well as in Heavenly Express and the play Peer Gynt, among other productions.

Disillusioned by the casting of Golden Boy and drawn by a contract offer that included a clause permitting time off for stage work, Garfield signed a seven-year feature-player agreement with Warner Bros. in the studio's New York office. It was Jack Warner who changed his name from Jacob Garfinkle to John Garfield. He went on to receive Academy Award nominations for his performances in Four Daughters in 1938 and Body and Soul in 1947, and became one of Warner Bros.' prominent stars, known for portraying brooding, rebellious, working-class characters. He is recognized as a predecessor of Method actors including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean.

Despite his Hollywood success, Garfield continued his stage work. He starred on Broadway in Skipper Next to God and The Big Knife, with his Broadway career extending through 1952. When called to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, he denied communist affiliation and refused to identify others, a stance that effectively ended his film career. Garfield died of a heart attack on May 21, 1952, at the age of 39. He had contracted scarlet fever in childhood, which caused permanent heart damage, and some have attributed his early death in part to the stress of the HUAC proceedings.