Kazan was a theatre and film director and producer. He was born to a Greek family in Turkey. They immigrated to the USA when Elia Kazan (Ýlyas Kazancýođlu, in Turkish) was only four years old. He went to school in New York. After graduating from Williams College, he studied drama at Yale. During the 1930s he was a theatre actor in Lee Strasberg’s group (the leftist Group Theatre Company) that specialized in Konstantin Stanislavski’s acting methods. In 1947, together with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, he founded the world famous Actor\'s Studio, from which emerged some of the most iconic actors of all time: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and many others. He began directing theatre plays in 1935. He was very successful and won three Tony awards for Best Director (in 1947 for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons; in 1949 also for Miller’s play Death of a Salesman and in 1959 for Archibald Macleish’s J.B.). His other important theater plays include A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). He made his feature film debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945. Afterwards he made The Sea of Grass (1947) with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Boomerang! (1947), based on a true story. For his films Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and On the Waterfront (1954) he won Oscars for Best Director. Less celebrated was his film about racism, Pinky (1949). After the film Panic in the Streets (1950), he directed the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter, which achieved great success. He continued his collaboration with Brando in the western Viva Zapata! (1952) and the crime drama On the Waterfront (1954). The critics praised his film East of Eden (1955) starring the young James Dean in his first role. Baby Doll (1956) is another of Kazan’s film adaptations of Tennessee Williams after which he made a drama about the world of media, A Face in the Crowd (1957), followed by Wild River (1960) and the romantic drama Splendor in the Grass (1961) starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. He also wrote screenplays. For the film America, America (1963), which he directed, he also wrote the screenplay based on his own book, as well as for his next film The Arrangement (1969). The low-budget film The Visitors (1972), based on his son Chris’s book and the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon (1976) were his last films. In 1999, he received an Oscar for Life-time Achievement in spite of partially disgruntled audiences, thanks to his hypocritical betrayal to McCarthy’s Committee for Un-American Activities in January 1951, when he ratted out eight people from the film world who were members of the Communist party, even though he himself had been one as well.