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Lee J. Cobb
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American character actor of stage, screen, and TV Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacob or Jacoby, was usually seen scowling and smoking a cigar. As a child, Cobb showed artistic promise as a virtuoso violinist, but any hope for a musical career was ended by a broken wrist. He ran away from home at age 17 and ended up in Hollywood. Unable to find film work there, he returned to New York and acted in radio dramas while going to night school at CCNY to learn accounting. Returning to California in 1931, he made his stage debut with the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York in 1935, he joined the celebrated Group Theater and appeared in several plays with them, including Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy.
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Lee J. Cobb died while preparing to repeat in Exorcist II: The Heretic the role of investigating detective he played in the original film. It was an ironic end for an actor whose impeccable credentials would, on any European stage, have earned him fame and honor. Unfortunately, this fine character actor, who appeared in the early plays of Odets for the Group Theatre and created Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, spent most of a long screen career in distinctive but undemanding work.
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After giving evidence to the House of Un-American Activities Committee Cobb was free to return to acting in Hollywood. He worked with Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg, two others who named names, on the Academy Award winning film, On the Waterfront (1954). Other films made by Cobb include The Left Hand of God (1955), Twelve Angry Men (1957), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), Exodus (1960), How the West Was Won (1962), Coogan's Bluff (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). Lee J. Cobb died in 1976.
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Born September 1911, December - American character actor of stage, screen, and TV Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacob or Jacoby, was usually seen scowling and smoking a cigar. As a child, Cobb showed artistic promise as a virtuoso violinist, but any hope for a musical career was ended by a broken wrist. He ran away from home at age 17 and ended up in Hollywood.
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On occasion, Cobb would play thoughtful, supportive characters, such as the psychiatrist who attempts to cure Joanne Woodward of her psychological disorder in The Three Faces of Eve. But in his best screen roles, he was effectively cast as an urban predator paradoxically tormented by twentieth-century anxieties: a wolf with an ulcer. Cobb redeemed a score of routine roles as gang boss, cop, or rancher with his capacity for conveying disquiet or a residual sensitivity. Behind his snarl lurked a weakness that already had betrayed him or would do so in the last reel. Gang-boss Rico Angelo in Party Girl is softened by a fugitive sentimentality toward Robert Taylor's tame cultivated attorney, while loneliness for the son he terrorized away from him racks the bigot in Twelve Angry Men.
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Facing pressure from his father (Lee J. Cobb) to pursue a career as a concert violinist, Joe Bonaparte (William Holden) -- persuaded by the lovely Lorna Moon (Barbara Stanwyck) -- instead turns his talents to a more lucrative vocation: prizefighting. Joe soon becomes a top boxer but comes to regret his decision when a racketeer (Joseph Calleia) buys his contract. Adolphe Menjou plays a slimy promoter who manipulates the naïve Joe.
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Lee J. Cobb