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##### November 1, 1988 OBITUARY ## John Houseman, Actor and Producer, 86, Dies ##### By MARILYN BERGER John Houseman, who spent more than half a century in the theater as an influential producer and director but who did not achieve fame until, at the age of 71, he portrayed a crusty law school professor in the film ''The Paper Chase'' and its subsequent television series, died of spinal cancer yesterday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 86 years old and despite his failing health had been working on various projects until three days ago. Professor Kingsfield, the role he played in ''The Paper Chase,'' led to another well-known part, that of a haughty spokesman for a brokerage house in its television commercials, delivering the lines: ''They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.'' Mr. Houseman spent a lifetime in the theater both behind the footlights and in front of them. ''Almost every major theater in America is run by a Houseman protege,'' said the director James Bridges, who cast Mr. Houseman, his mentor, as Professor Kingsfield in the film ''The Paper Chase.'' Mr. Bridges said: ''Before there was Kingsfield there was John Houseman. He was the Kingsfield to many of the actors, producers, directors on the American stage today.'' Eleven years after he came to the United States from Rumania by way of England, Mr. Houseman joined with Orson Welles in 1937 to mount startling productions of the classics in their avant-garde Mercury Theater. Their Mercury Theater of the Air produced ''The War of the Worlds'' broadcast that marked its 50th anniversary on Sunday, just hours before Mr. Houseman died. He had his first break in show business in 1934 when he was made the director of Virgil Thomson's opera ''Four Saints in Three Acts,'' in a production that was underwritten by a Hartford organization called the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. Toward what looked like the end of a long career, when he was 66 years old, Mr. Houseman helped establish the school of drama at the Juilliard School and also became the co-founder and longtime artistic director of the Acting Company, the touring repertory group whose alumni include Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone. He resigned as artistic director last summer. Mr. Houseman said he was about to retire into what he called ''a life of fairly restricted options'' when, through ''pure luck,'' Mr. Bridges, one of his former assistants at the Professional Theater Group at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was directing ''The Paper Chase,'' asked him to take the part of the formidable, slightly sadistic Professor Kingsfield. The role in the 1973 movie led to an Academy Award in 1974, to the re-creation of the role in a television series and ultimately to television commercials and a far more comfortable old age than he had anticipated. ''I became rich through this incredible accident of 'The Paper Chase,' '' he said. He confessed to enjoying his new celebrity as Professor Kingsfield, the imperious persona he carried over into his commercials for Smith Barney Harris & Upham, an investment concern. But the man on the screen was very different from the man himself. Mr. Houseman personally was warm, friendly and not at all the curmudgeonly character he had created. Became a Citizen in 1943 Mr. Houseman was born on Sept. 22, 1902, in Bucharest, several years before his British mother and his Alsatian father, a successful grain trader, were married. Young Jacques Haussmann, as he was then called, became a seasoned traveler in the capitals of Europe - he said he celebrated two of his first four birthdays on board the Orient Express between Paris and Bucharest. His formal education began and ended at the Clifton school in England. He came to the United States in 1924 but his resident status was not regularized until he was admitted as a legal immigrant in 1936. Even when he went to work for the Office of War Information, he was an alien - an enemy alien, since Rumania was part of the Axis. He became a citizen March 1, 1943. A Director by 'Accident' As a young man, Mr. Houseman followed in the footsteps of his father into the grain trade in the United States and abroad, but he lost his money and his business in the Depression. ''I was making a very bad living as an adapter, translator and hanger-around in the theater,'' he recalled during an interview late in 1986. ''I became a director by pure accident.'' At a cocktail party he was introduced to the composer Virgil Thomson, who needed someone to work on his opera and offered Mr. Houseman the job. ''There was no reason why he should have done that,'' Mr. Houseman said. ''I didn't know anything about anything.'' ''Four Saints in Three Acts'' had a libretto by Gertrude Stein (''Pigeons on the grass, alas'') and an all-black cast, whose members were chosen because of their voice quality and because Mr. Thomson thought they moved with dignity. It opened in Hartford in 1934, was brought to New York and then toured the country. It was a critical success, but because the production marked him as a maverick and a highbrow, Mr. Houseman remembered, it did not lead to many immediate offers. The Depression that ruined his grain business also offered him a lifeline -the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theater Project. In 1935 Mr. Houseman and Orson Welles organized the W.P.A.'s Negro Theater Project, which made theater history with the production of a version of ''Macbeth'' set in Haiti, with voodoo priestesses playing the roles of Shakespeare's witches. Partnership With Welles This was the beginning of what was to become a fruitful but stormy partnership in which, Mr. Houseman said, Welles ''was the teacher, I, the apprentice.'' Mr. Houseman said he was both an eager student of Welles's genius and a calming influence on Welles's erratic, unpredictable nature. After 10 months with the Negro Theater Project, Mr. Houseman wrote in his memoirs, he was faced with the dilemma of risking his future ''on a partnership with a 20-year-old boy in whose talent I had unquestioning faith but with whom I must increasingly play the combined and tricky roles of producer, censor, adviser, impresario, father, older brother and bosom friend.'' He took the chance and in 1936, with Welles, created the Classical Theater, another W.P.A. project, for which Welles directed and played the title role in Marlowe's ''Tragical History of Dr. Faustus.'' Mr. Houseman and Welles defied the Government and in effect rang down the curtain on Federal financing for their theater with their production of Marc Blitzstein's proletarian musical ''The Cradle Will Rock.'' The production became a Broadway legend when the cast members, caught in a political imbroglio that closed their theater, led their audience in a ragtag parade uptown to a hastily rented space and, enjoined by Actors' Equity from going on the stage, performed their roles from their seats. While there are those who question whether Mr. Houseman's role in the creative collaboration was as great as he later made it out to be, he did serve as Welles's producer during some of Welles's most productive years. ''You had to be pretty bloody good and pretty bloody clever to handle Orson,'' the actor Hume Cronyn said. The Mercury Theater was the direct offspring of the W.P.A. theaters of which Mr. Houseman wrote, ''On the broad wings of the Federal eagle, we had risen to success and fame beyond ourselves as America's youngest, cleverest, most creative and audacious producers to whom none of the ordinary rules of the theater applied.'' The creative magic was sustained and in 1937 the Mercury's first commercial production, ''Julius Caesar,'' became another success. Mr. Houseman called the decision to use modern dress ''an essential element in Orson's conception of 'Julius Caesar' as a political melodrama with clear contemporary parallels.'' The Mercury became a milestone in the Broadway theater with its productions, which also included ''The Shoemaker's Holiday,'' ''Heartbreak House,'' ''Five Kings'' and a stage treatment of Richard Wright's ''Native Son.'' 'Citizen Kane' and Hollywood Success on the stage led to the Mercury Theater of the Air, a series of hourlong radio programs on CBS. Mr. Houseman wrote most of the scripts, which he said Welles performed with ''obsessive perfectionism.'' Their now legendary radio broadcast of ''The War of the Worlds,'' an adaptation of an H. G. Wells story about the invasion of Earth by creatures from Mars, was so believable that it created panic along the East Coast. On Sunday evening a new version of the program was broadcast to mark its 50th anniversary. The Welles-Houseman collaboration continued in Hollywood. Although Mr. Welles took credit for the screenplay of ''Citizen Kane,'' Mr. Houseman said the credit belonged to Herman J. Mankiewicz, an assertion that led to a break with Welles. Mr. Houseman took some credit himself for the general shaping of the story line and for editing the script. Between 1945 and 1962 Mr. Houseman produced 18 films for Paramount, Universal and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including ''The Blue Dahlia'' (1946), ''Letters From an Unknown Woman (1948), ''They Live by Night'' (1949), ''The Bad and the Beautiful'' (1953), ''Julius Caesar'' (1953), ''Executive Suite'' (1954), ''The Cobweb'' (1955), ''Lust for Life'' (1956), ''All Fall Down'' (1962) and ''Two Weeks in Another Town'' (1962). Over the years his films were nominated for 20 Academy Awards and won 7, 5 of them for ''The Bad and the Beautiful,'' which starred Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner. With many of his colleagues, Mr. Houseman became involved in the 1940's in what he called ''vaguely patriotic activities'' as a member of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a group whose leaders were subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to answer questions about Communist influence in the movie industry. And during his W.P.A. years, Mr. Houseman wrote that he frequently worked with members of the Communist Party, although he never joined the party himself. He emerged relatively unscathed from the blacklists of the late 40's and 50's in which many cultural figures could not find work because of their political views. Theater and Opera Director When he was not making movies, Mr. Houseman returned to the theater. He directed the Broadway productions of ''Lute Song'' with Mary Martin in 1946 and ''King Lear'' with Louis Calhern in 1950, as well as ''Coriolanus'' with Robert Ryan at the Phoenix Theater in 1954. On the West Coast, in 1947, he staged the world premiere of Bertolt Brecht's ''Galileo'' with Charles Laughton, and Thornton Wilder's ''Skin of Our Teeth.'' In 1941, he directed ''Anna Christie'' with Ingrid Bergman. Mr. Houseman directed ''Otello'' and ''Tosca'' for the Dallas Opera Company, and was the resident director of opera for the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York. He also produced television programs, for which he won three Emmy Awards. Among his programs were ''The Seven Lively Arts'' in 1957, ''Playhouse 90'' in 1958 and 1959, and ''Gideon's Trumpet'' in 1983. He was artistic director of the American Shakespeare Festival from 1956 to 1959 and in 1960 became artistic director of the Professional Theater Group at the University of California at Los Angeles, which became part of the Mark Taper Forum. Between and sometimes during engagements, he contributed articles and book reviews to national publications, and wrote three volumes of memoirs, which are a chronicle of an era as well as a testimony to his phenomenal powers of recall: ''Run Through'' (1972), ''Front and Center'' (1979) and ''Final Dress'' (1983). In 1986 he published ''Entertainers and the Entertained.'' A fourth volume, ''Unfinished Business: Memoirs, 1902 to 1988,'' a distillation of his earlier books with some new material, is scheduled for publication in two weeks. Theater in His Name In 1986, the John Houseman Theater Center was established as a home for the Acting Company on West 42d Street in New York. Many of the performers were drawn from the Juilliard drama school, which also produced such stars as William Hurt, Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams. While Mr. Houseman was establishing the drama department at Juilliard, he was also becoming a character actor in the movies and on television. In addition to his life-changing role in ''The Paper Chase'' - which he liked to say made him ''the second most credible man in America after Walter Cronkite'' - he acted in ''Seven Days in May'' (1964), ''Rollerball'' (1975), ''Three Days of the Condor''(1975), ''The Cheap Detective'' (1977), ''Ghost Story'' (1981) and other movies. He also played leading roles in a number of television programs. His most recent roles were in the James Bridges film ''Bright Lights, Big City'' and in Woody Allen's ''Another Woman.'' He will also be seen in ''Scrooge,'' to be released at Christmas time. He married the former Joan Courtney in 1950. She and their two sons, John Michael, an anthropologist in Paris, and Charles Sebastian, an artist in Sunapee, N.H., survive him. An earlier marriage to Zita Johann, an actress, ended in divorce. The family said there would be no funeral. Memorial services are to be held in Los Angeles and New York at a later date. 'I've Been So Very Lucky' When he was 84, still in what he considered perfect health and still favoring the tweeds and checkered caps of Professor Kingsfield, he was able to look back at his career with satisfaction, even pleasure. ''There's not a long list of regrets,'' he said. ''I've been so very lucky. Things have fallen so consistently into my open mouth. There's nothing I wish I'd done.'' He said he had enjoyed everything -theater, movies, radio, television, opera. ''Anything I'm proud of or pleased with is the mass of stuff I was able to add up because of my longevity,'' he said. ''But if God sent down word that I could do just one thing, I'm sure I'd gravitate back to the theater.''
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