Lee J. Cobb biography

Synopsis

Early Career

Actor. Born Leo Jacob Cobb on December 8, 1911 in New York City to Benjamin Jacob Cobb, a compositor for a foreign-language newspaper, and Kate Neilecht. He was educated in the New York City public school system. As a youth Cobb studied the violin in hopes of becoming a symphony-quality musician; he showed promise but a broken wrist and consequent lack of muscular control in his hand ended this dream. By the time he graduated from high school in 1929, Cobb had a new dream of becoming an actor.

He went to Los Angeles in the hopes of finding work in the movies but made no progress. He soon returned to New York City, where he worked selling radio tubes during the day and took classes in accounting at City College of New York at night. In 1931 he set out again for Los Angeles and a second try at breaking into the movies. Although he did not have success in Hollywood, he did land a job with the Pasadena Playhouse, where he worked as an actor and director from 1931 to 1933. After this period of apprenticeship, he spent another two years acting with various touring companies and on the New York stage.

Breakthrough in Theater

His big career break came in 1935, when he was asked to join the Group Theatre, a company that had been founded in 1931 in New York City with the intention of presenting American plays with serious social content--in contrast to the mainstream "entertainments" produced on Broadway. The Group Theatre, with its leftist sympathies, emphasis on the Stanislavsky system of acting (so-called Method acting), and encouragement of such American playwrights as Clifford Odets and William Saroyan, had a profound effect on American theater and eventually American movies before its dissolution in 1941. Besides Odets and Saroyan, Cobb's associates in the Group included Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Stella Adler. Cobb played a variety of parts in the Group productions of Waiting for Lefty (1935), Till the Day I Die (1935), Johnny Johnson (1936), and Thunder Rock (1939), Golden Boy (1937), one of the Group's greatest successes, launched Cobb's film career; when the play was made into a movie in 1939, Cobb was asked to join the Hollywood cast. He had earlier appeared on screen in 1937 in North of the Rio Grande.

Between 1939 and 1943, Cobb moved back and forth from the stage to the movies. He acted in such plays as The Fifth Column (1940), Clash by Night (1941), and Jason (1942) and had parts in the films This Thing Called Love (1941), Men of Boys Town (1941), Paris Calling (1941), The Moon Is Down (1943), Tonight We Raid Calais (1943), and Song of Bernadette (1943). In 1943, Cobb enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces as a private.