The son of Sicilian immigrants, Ben Gazzara grew up on New York City's tough Lower East Side in a cold-water flat with the bathtub in the kitchen, speaking Italian as his first language. While movies of the era fueled his dreams, it was the applause greeting his first performance in a play at the Boys Club when he was 12 that really sold him on the life of an actor. After studying engineering briefly, he dropped out of the City College of New York to attend (on scholarship) Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. Later as a member of the Actors Studio, he took