page_title: John Cassavetes
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: John Cassavetes / Death
caption_attribution_description: English: John Cassavetes grave at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Brentwood, California. December 2011.
context_page_description: John Nicholas Cassavetes was an American actor, film director, and screenwriter. First known as an actor on television and in film, Cassavetes also became a pioneer of American independent cinema, writing and directing movies financed in part with income from his acting work. AllMovie called him "an iconoclastic maverick," while The New Yorker suggested that he "may be the most influential American director of the last half century."
  As an actor, Cassavetes starred in notable Hollywood films throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including Edge of the City, The Dirty Dozen, and Rosemary's Baby. He began his directing career with the 1959 independent feature Shadows and followed with independent productions such as Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, and Love Streams, in addition to intermittent studio work.
  Cassavetes' films employed an actor-centered approach which privileged character examination over traditional Hollywood storytelling or stylized production values. His films became associated with an improvisational, cinéma vérité aesthetic.
context_section_description: Cassavetes died from cirrhosis of the liver on February 3, 1989, at the age of 59, caused by many years of alcoholism. He is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery in Los Angeles.
  At the time of his death, Cassavetes had amassed a collection of more than 40 unproduced screenplays, as well as a novel, Husbands. He also left three unproduced plays: Sweet Talk, Entrances and Exits and Begin the Beguine. But Begin the Beguine, in German translation, was co-produced by Needcompany of Belgium and Burgtheater of Vienna; it premiered on stage at Vienna's Akademietheater in 2014.
caption: John Cassavetes's grave
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