John Houseman

Origins and early life

John Houseman was born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest on 22 September 1902, the son of an Alsatian Jewish grain merchant, Georges Haussmann, and of May Davies, a British woman of Welsh-Irish Christian family, and he wrote in his memoirs with clear eyes about the Jewish father and the Anglican schooling at Clifton that made him, as he put it, a man of no fixed country.

Work and career

He worked in the grain trade in Argentina and the United States until the crash of 1929 ruined him, and turned to the theatre. In 1934 he directed the premiere of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts with an all-Black cast, and in 1935 he met the twenty-year-old Orson Welles. Together they staged the 'voodoo' Macbeth in Harlem for the Federal Theatre Project, then in 1937 founded the Mercury Theatre, whose modern-dress Julius Caesar and whose radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in October 1938 made theatre history.

Houseman brought Herman Mankiewicz and Welles together on the script of Citizen Kane (1941), then went to Hollywood as a producer. His films include The Blue Dahlia, Letter from an Unknown Woman, They Live by Night, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) with Marlon Brando, Executive Suite and Lust for Life. In 1968 he founded and ran the Drama Division of the Juilliard School, whose first graduates included Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone and Robin Williams, and from it the touring Acting Company.

Recognition

At seventy-one he played the terrifying law professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase (1973), won the Academy Award for best supporting actor, and became a household face in the television series and in the Smith Barney commercials whose line 'they make money the old-fashioned way — they earn it' he delivered with ironic relish. He died in Malibu on 31 October 1988.