Lee J. Cobb

Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacoby on December 8, 1911, in New York City, was an American actor whose career spanned Broadway, film, and television across four decades. He died on February 11, 1976. Raised in the Bronx on Wilkins Avenue near Crotona Park, Cobb was the son of Benjamin Jacob, a compositor for The Jewish Daily Forward, and Kate Jacob, a homemaker. His family was of Russian and Romanian Jewish origin.

Cobb developed an interest in acting early in life, running away from home at sixteen to pursue work in Hollywood. He joined Borrah Minevitch's Harmonica Rascals as a musician and appeared in a short film featuring the group, but failed to establish himself and returned to New York. He subsequently studied accounting at New York University while working as a radio salesman before traveling back to California to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. His film debut came at age twenty-three in two episodes of the 1934 serial The Vanishing Shadow. In 1935, he joined the Manhattan-based Group Theatre, which also marked the beginning of his Broadway career.

His Broadway work began in 1935 and continued through 1968. Through the Group Theatre, Cobb performed summer stock in 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut, and appeared opposite Elia Kazan in productions of Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. His Broadway credits include Bitter Stream, The Gentle People, and Mother, among other productions. He also appeared in Ernest Hemingway's only full-length play, The Fifth Column, and in Odets' Clash by Night. His Broadway debut was as a saloonkeeper in a dramatization of Crime and Punishment, a production that closed after fifteen nights.

The defining achievement of Cobb's stage career was originating the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which opened at the Morosco Theatre in February 1949 under the direction of Elia Kazan and ran through November 1950. Miller, who praised Cobb as the greatest dramatic actor he had ever seen, altered a line describing the physical appearance of the title character after Cobb was cast, changing the word "shrimp" to "walrus." The production won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Miller later offered Cobb the role of Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge, which Cobb declined. In 1968, Cobb appeared as King Lear in a Broadway production that also featured Stacy Keach as Edmund, René Auberjonois as the Fool, and Philip Bosco as Kent. The production achieved a run of seventy-two performances, the longest in Broadway history for that play at the time.

During World War II, Cobb enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces with the intention of becoming a pilot but was assigned instead to a radio unit. He was later transferred to the First Motion Picture Unit, where he participated in Moss Hart's Army Emergency Relief fundraiser productions, including This is the Army and Winged Victory.

Cobb's film career began in the 1930s, when he was able to convincingly portray middle-aged and older characters despite his youth. His first credited film role came in the 1937 Hopalong Cassidy western Rustlers' Valley, for which he was billed as Lee Colt. He appeared in the 1939 film adaptation of Golden Boy, though in a different role than he had played on stage, and was cast as the Kralahome in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam, a production that later partially served as the basis for the musical The King and I. In August 1955, while filming The Houston Story, Cobb suffered a heart attack and was replaced by Gene Barry. Later that year, he received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of corrupt union boss Johnny Friendly in Kazan's On the Waterfront. In 1957, he played the abrasive Juror Number Three in Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men, a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. His second Academy Award nomination came for his portrayal of Fyodor Karamazov in Richard Brooks' adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, also released in 1958. Additional film roles included Dock Tobin in Man of the West, Barak Ben Canaan in Exodus, Marshall Lou Ramsey in How the West Was Won, and the supervisor of Derek Flint in the spy spoofs Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. He received a second Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Come Blow Your Horn in 1963. Among his final film appearances was the role of Washington, D.C. homicide detective Lt. William Kinderman in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. His last two films, Cross Shot and Nick the Sting, were released posthumously.

On television, Cobb starred in the dual roles of Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote in the 1959 CBS production I, Don Quixote, which later served as the basis for the musical Man of La Mancha. From 1962 to 1966, he played Judge Henry Garth, owner of the Shiloh Ranch in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, in the first four seasons of the NBC Western series The Virginian. In 1966, he reprised the role of Willy Loman in a CBS television adaptation of Death of a Salesman that featured Gene Wilder, James Farentino, Bernie Kopell, and George Segal, with Mildred Dunnock again playing Linda Loman as she had in both the original stage production and the 1951 film. Cobb received an Emmy nomination for the performance. He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor three times in total. He later appeared in the ABC legal drama The Young Lawyers as David Barrett. Among his final television appearances was Origins of the Mafia, a miniseries filmed in Italy, and an ABC documentary on the American Revolution titled Suddenly an Eagle, which aired six months after his death.

In 1951, Cobb was named as a Communist Party member in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee by actor Larry Parks. Cobb refused to testify before the committee for two years, but relented in 1953 when his career was threatened by a potential Hollywood blacklist, at which point he named twenty people as former members of the Communist Party USA. In 1981, Cobb was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.