Morris Carnovsky

Morris Carnovsky (September 5, 1897 – September 1, 1992) was an American stage and film actor whose Broadway career spanned four decades, from 1922 to 1962. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Ike and Jennie Stillman Carnovsky, both Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, he was raised in a household where his father, a Lithuanian-born grocer, introduced him to performances of the Yiddish theater. His younger brother was the librarian Leon Carnovsky (1903–1975). His nephew is character actor James Karen. Carnovsky attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he was an active member of the Thyrsus Dramatic Society, one of the earliest student-run theater groups west of the Mississippi. He graduated in 1920, relocated to Boston, and began his first professional stage work there before making his way to New York.

His Broadway debut came in 1922, when he appeared as Reb Aaron in The God of Vengeance. Two years later he joined the Theatre Guild acting company, taking on the title role in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Additional Theatre Guild credits included Saint Joan and The Doctor's Dilemma, both by George Bernard Shaw, The Brothers Karamazov, and the role of Kublai Khan in Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions.

In 1931, Carnovsky was among the founders of the Group Theatre, a New York company that operated until 1940 and concentrated on socially and politically engaged drama. He appeared in nearly every major Group Theatre production, frequently in roles written for him by actor and playwright Clifford Odets. His work with the Group included the Odets plays Awake and Sing, Golden Boy, Paradise Lost, and Rocket to the Moon, as well as Sidney Kingsley's Men in White, the anti-war musical Johnny Johnson, the Elia Kazan-directed Thunder Rock, My Sister Eileen, and Cafe Crown. Reviewing the Group's production of Awake and Sing, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote that Carnovsky, playing "the lonely old sage struggling with ideas he cannot resolve or use, gives a performance worth a mayor's reception on the steps of City Hall." Carnovsky also summered with the Group at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut, in 1936, participating in their summer rehearsal periods. Both he and his wife, actress Phoebe Brand, joined the American Communist Party during this period.

In 1937, Carnovsky traveled to Hollywood with several Group Theatre colleagues in an effort to raise funds for the company. His film debut came in William Dieterle's The Life of Emile Zola, the Academy Award-winning best picture of that year, starring Paul Muni. A supporting role in Anatole Litvak's Tovarich followed before he returned to New York. In 1939, he provided narration for the documentary film The City, screened at the New York World's Fair. After the Group Theatre dissolved in 1940, he returned to Hollywood and joined the Actors' Lab, an acting troupe modeled on the Group, serving as its first director. His subsequent film roles included the retired Norwegian schoolteacher Sixtus Andresen in the 1943 Warner Bros. anti-Nazi film Edge of Darkness, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Errol Flynn; George Gershwin's father in Rhapsody in Blue (1945); the villainous nightclub owner Martinelli opposite Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning (1947); LeBret in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), starring José Ferrer; Dr. Raymond Hartley in the mystery The Second Woman; and a supporting role in Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy, also released in 1950.

On Broadway, Carnovsky continued to accumulate credits across a range of productions, including Success Story, Both Your Houses, Gentlewoman, and Counterattack. During the 1950–51 season he appeared alongside Fredric March in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, adapted by Arthur Miller. Atkinson again praised his work, writing that "the rich, forceful and accomplished acting of Morris Carnovsky as the cynical mayor of the town" provided dramatic balance to March's performance.

In April 1951, Carnovsky was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to answer the committee's questions, citing his constitutional rights. Actor Marc Lawrence testified at the same hearing that he and Carnovsky had attended Communist Party functions together, and actor Sterling Hayden testified that Party meetings had sometimes been held at Carnovsky's Hollywood home. In 1952, Elia Kazan named Carnovsky, his wife Phoebe Brand, and six other Group Theatre members as Communists in his own HUAC testimony. Carnovsky's refusal to cooperate with the committee effectively ended his Hollywood career. He and Brand were blacklisted. In May 1953, he was publicly disinvited from a scheduled appearance at a Jewish Community Center in Queens on the grounds that he "would not be acceptable to the community." That same year, he and Brand appeared off-Broadway in The World of Sholem Aleichem alongside a cast assembled largely from blacklisted actors; the production ran for two years.

Carnovsky returned to Broadway in 1955, playing Priam in Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates. The following year, at the invitation of producer and director John Houseman, he began performing Shakespeare at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, an association that would define the later phase of his career. He went on to perform the title roles in college campus productions of King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, re-establishing himself as a major stage presence after the years of blacklisting. In 1975, reflecting on the HUAC experience, he described it as "revolting, injurious, hurtful," but also acknowledged that it had, in an unexpected way, strengthened him as an actor.