![]() The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. Houseman immediately hired Welles and assigned him to direct Macbeth for the FTP's Negro Theater Unit, a production that became known as the " Voodoo Macbeth", as it was set in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe (and with voodoo witch doctors for the three Weird Sisters) and starred Jack Carter in the title role. Federal Theater Project in New York: Negro Theatre Unit: " Macbeth", c. During the four years of its existence its productions played to more than thirty million people in more than two hundred theatres as well as portable stages, school auditoriums and public parks the country over. Within a year of its formation, the Federal Theatre had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll at an average wage of approximately twenty dollars a week. Houseman describes the experience in one of his memoirs: The Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project was headed by Rose McClendon, a well-known black actress, and Houseman, a theatre producer. In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration put unemployed theatre performers and employees to work. He supervised the direction of Walk Together Chillun in 1936. Among the cast was Houseman's ex-wife, Zita Johann, who had co-starred with Boris Karloff three years earlier in Universal's The Mummy.Īlthough the play opened to indifferent notices and ran for a mere three performances, it nevertheless led to the forging of a theatrical team, a fruitful but stormy partnership in which Houseman said Welles "was the teacher, I, the apprentice." Panic opened at the Imperial Theatre on March 15, 1935. Welles consented and, after preliminary conversations, agreed to leave the play he was in after a single night to take the lead in Houseman's production. Although the central figure is a man in his late fifties, Houseman became obsessed by the notion that a young man named Orson Welles he had seen in Katharine Cornell's production of Romeo and Juliet was the only person qualified to play the leading role. In 1934, Houseman was looking to cast Panic, a play he was producing based on a drama by Archibald MacLeish concerning a Wall Street financier whose world crumbles about him when consumed by the crash of 1929. He later directed The Lady from the Sea (1934) and Valley Forge (1934). Composer Virgil Thomson recruited him to direct Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), Thomson's collaboration with Gertrude Stein. On Broadway he co-wrote Three and One (1933) and And Be My Love (1934). Houseman worked as a speculator in the international grain markets, only turning to the theater following the 1929 stock market crash. ![]() He became a United States citizen in 1943. He was educated in England at Clifton College, became a British subject, and worked in the grain trade in London before emigrating to the United States in 1925, where he took the stage name of John Houseman. His mother was British, from a Christian family of Welsh and Irish descent. Houseman was born Jacques Haussmann on September 22, 1902, in Bucharest, Romania, the son of May (née Davies) a governess and Georges Haussmann, who ran a grain business. He reprised the role of Kingsfield in the 1978 television series adaptation. Kingsfield in the 1973 film The Paper Chase. ![]() He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Professor Charles W. ![]() He became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director Orson Welles from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of Citizen Kane and his collaboration, as producer of The Blue Dahlia, with writer Raymond Chandler on the screenplay. John Houseman (born Jacques Haussmann September 22, 1902 – October 31, 1988) was a Romanian-born British-American actor and producer of theatre, film, and television.
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