- Born
- Died
- Stanley Kauffmann was born on April 24, 1916 in New York City, New York, USA. He is known for The Battle for 'I Am Curious-Yellow' (2003), Camera Three (1955) and For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009). He was married to Laura Cohen. He died on October 9, 2013 in New York City, New York, USA.
- SpouseLaura Cohen(1943 - 2012) (her death)
- Film critic.
- In 1944 the children's play he wrote, entitled "Bobino,", was produced at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, before it moved on to Broadway. It has become notable because it featured a newcomer named Marlon Brando in his very first professional performance, playing a security guard.
- His father was a dentist. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He attended New York University, where he studied drama, planning to become an actor. He received a bachelor's degree in 1935.
- At NYU, he began writing dozens of one-act plays. He also became an actor and stage manager with the Washington Square Players, a repertory company affiliated with the university (not to be confused with the group that later became the Theater Guild). The company performed mostly Shakespeare and Shaw. Internal disputes and the outbreak of WWII led to the company's demise.
- He wrote novels and worked as an editor at Knopf. In the late 1950s he began writing film reviews, and sent one to The New Republic magazine, which offered him a permanent job. He was the film critic for The New Republic for 55 years, with a break in 1966, when he was briefly a theater critic for The New York Times.
- [on _Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)_] This picture was made particularly for males, who carry a portable shrine with them of their adolescence, a chalice-of-self that was better then, before the world's affairs, or - in a complex way - sex intruded.
- [re Marlon Brando's first Broadway appearance] He was wonderful. He had a way of falling [after being hit] that made you know that he'd thought about how to do it a different way from the way every other actor had ever done it, and yet his fall fit into what was going on. It wasn't merely freakish.
- [re his approach to film criticism]... a view of film as a descendant of the theater and literature, certainly sui generis but not without ancestors or cousin, to be judged by its own unique standards which are yet analogous to those of other arts: a view that is pluralistic, aesthetic but not anti-science, contemporary but not unhistorical, and humanistic.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content