Julian Beck

Julian Beck (May 31, 1925 – September 14, 1985) was an American actor, stage director, poet, and painter. He is best known for co-founding and directing the Living Theatre, as well as his role as Reverend Henry Kane, the malevolent preacher in the supernatural horror film Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986). The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the documentary film Signals Through the Flames (1983). Early life Beck was born on May 31, 1925, in the Washington Heights, Manhattan, to Mabel Lucille (née Blum), a teacher, and Irving Beck, a businessman. He was named after Julia Beck (née Blum), his mother's sister and his father's first wife, who had died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. He briefly attended Yale University, but withdrew to pursue writing and art. He was an abstract expressionist painter in the 1940s, but his career turned upon meeting his future wife. In 1943, he met Judith Malina and quickly came to share her passion for theatre; they founded The Living Theatre in 1947. Career Beck co-directed the Living Theatre until his death. The group's primary influence was Antonin Artaud, who espoused the Theatre of Cruelty, which was supposed to shock the audience out of complacency. This took different forms. In one example, from Jack Gelber's The Connection (1959), a drama about drug addiction, actors playing junkies wandered the audience demanding money for a fix. The Living Theatre moved out of New York in 1964, after the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) shut it down when Beck failed to pay $23,000 in back taxes. After a sensational trial in which Beck and Malina represented themselves, they were found guilty by a jury.