John Houseman has gone by many names—producer, director, actor, writer, broadcaster, mentor—but when the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently mounted a tribute to him by screening his movies (February 15-March 10), David Thompson, an eminent film critic, referred to him as a "hero." Hero is a profound word: a hero is a person who is admired for having done something very brave or having achieved something great. What did Houseman do to merit this appellation?

For starters, he went from being a Romanian-born alien who started a career in grain trading to becoming one of Hollywood's most successful producers and an Academy Award-winning actor. The role that landed him the 1973 Oscar for best supporting actor (Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase) also made him, as he liked to say, "the second most credible man in America after Walter Cronkite."

John Houseman

It was Houseman who unearthed the whiz kid Orson Welles and helped birth the classic film Citizen Kane; Houseman who produced (among others) Vincent Minelli's Lust for Life; Houseman who made theater history with the production of a voodoo Macbeth in Depression-era America, using African-American actors. It was Houseman who was largely responsible for the founding of the Mercury Theater, Los Angeles's Ahmanson Theater and Mark Taper Forum, the Acting Company, and The Juilliard School's Drama Division. Houseman was also one of the key founding fathers of the Voice of America when it began operation during the early days of World War II.

To understand the true brilliance of this man, one has to consider that almost every major theater in America is run by a Houseman protégé, and that, almost single-handedly, he raised the term "movie producer" to a level of honor.

Born Jacques Haussmann on September 22, 1902 in Bucharest to an unmarried British mother and Alsatian father, John Houseman came to the United States in 1924. He followed in his father's footsteps as a grain trader, lost his money in the Depression, and was "making a very bad living as an adapter, translator, and hanger-around in the theater" (as he said in a 1986 interview), when he was introduced to composer Virgil Thomson at a cocktail party. Mr. Thomson needed someone to direct his opera and offered Houseman the job. Four Saints in Three Acts became a critical success and toured the country.

The Depression offered Houseman immense opportunities through the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theater Project. It was through this that he formed the fruitful but stormy collaboration with the 20-year-old "boy genius" Orson Welles. Together they organized several theater projects, including the Mercury Theater (which later became the Campbell Playhouse) and featured such stars as Katherine Hepburn, Helen Hayes, Lawrence Olivier, and Lionel Barrymore. Houseman and Welles' broadcast of The War of the Worlds, an adaptation of an H.G. Wells story about the invasion of the Earth by creatures from Mars, was so believable that it created panic along the East Coast, sending people scurrying into the streets and packing into cars to head for the mountains. The next day, the scandal created by the program propelled Houseman and Welles to Hollywood. Citizen Kane was their penultimate project; Houseman was never given any real credit for the film, and Welles was a difficult partner at the best of times.

While there are those who question whether Houseman's role in the creative collaboration was as great as he later made it out to be, he did serve as Welles' producer during some of Welles' most productive years. "You have to be pretty bloody good and pretty bloody clever to handle Orson," the actor Hume Cronyn once said. After the Houseman-Welles partnership split up, Welles was never quite as successful as before.

The collaboration with Orson Welles served to demonstrate that Houseman had a flair for uncovering and nurturing talent and also for developing any arena that he chose to enter. Before Houseman, few movie producers read film scripts, and the producers controlled the show. Houseman-who, between 1945 and 1962, produced 18 films for Paramount, Universal, and MGM (some of which are masterpieces, all of which are classics)—ensured that scripts were read, storylines adhered to, and artistic integrity maintained.

In the early days of World War II, Houseman left Hollywood and joined Robert Sherwood, a four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who oversaw foreign information services for President Roosevelt. Houseman was assigned to create the wartime propaganda programs that would become the Voice of America. In memory of his brilliance, Studio 4 at the Voice of America's Washington headquarters is now called "The John Houseman Studio" and a commemorative plaque secured to the studio wall that features his profile is inscribed, "As he organized the Voice of America's earliest broadcasts, he set a standard for accuracy and the telling of truth. May all who speak into VOA microphones follow his example."

When he was not making movies, Houseman returned to the theater. When he was not directing and staging plays, he produced television programs, for which he won three Emmy Awards.

Houseman's real genius, though, lay in development and in forming and encouraging collaborations. He wished to make the theater more permanent and provide a continuity to actors' experiences, so he founded the Acting Company, America's only nationally touring classical repertory theater. He wished to carve a space where actors could learn their craft in the best tradition possible, so he founded the Drama Division at The Juilliard School. With almost a bloodhound's nose for talent, he picked out a virtually unknown director to teach and direct at the School; Michael Kahn, who now heads the Drama Division, is today one of the most respected and acclaimed theater directors in the country. He handpicked most of the original faculty, including Margot Harley and Marian Seldes, both now renowned theater personalities. Says Seldes of Houseman, "We loved each other because of him. We got to know other wonderful people because of him."

All who knew Houseman remark on his inexhaustible nerve, unimpeachable taste, vital energy, and real adoration for those in whom he saw great ability. Says Kahn of Houseman, "He loved young talent. He had so many protégés." Had it not been for Houseman's relentless nurturing, artists as self-destructive as Nicholas Ray (co-producer of They Live by Night and On Dangerous Ground) would never have stood a chance.

According to Harley, producing director and founding member of the Acting Company, "John was a producer in the true sense of the word. He took great people, put them together and produced quality. He had the ability to make you want to do your best. You wanted his approval. He had an air to his work and method which said, we can make something of worth. Whatever it was that he did, he wanted to do it as well as humanly possible and he inspired all his co-workers to think the same way."

Robert Joseph, a respected Broadway and London theater producer, says, "He loved opening doors. He loved the idea of community. He was a real teacher and developer of humans without regard to race or color."

People have said of Houseman that he had a huge ego. "No," states Kahn emphatically. "It was just the force of his incredible personality. He was always working on two or three things at the same time, encouraging collaborations, starting theaters, teaching, writing, handling temperamental, neurotic artists. He was a man of great vision."

After being a teacher and producer for so many years, towards the end of his life Houseman was cast as an actor in a film directed by one of his protégés. In many ways, The Paper Chase is a tribute to the inspiring force that Houseman was.

Houseman's legacy echoes in the institutions that survive him. The Juilliard School's Drama Division has produced some of the most notable actors and playwrights in America, among them Robin Williams, Kevin Spacey, and David Auburn (author of Proof), while the Acting Company's roster of alumni reads like a who's who of American theater: Kevin Kline (also a Juilliard alum), Patti LuPone (ditto), and Jeffrey Wright, to name a few. All organizations and forms of media touched by Houseman carry the imprint of his greatness. Juilliard's Drama Division continues in the same style, accepting actors of different backgrounds, races, colors, and nationalities, producing classical theater and also groundbreaking new work.

This is the reason that, when the Brooklyn Academy of Music commemorated Houseman by showing his movies, it makes one wonder if there is not always some homage being paid somewhere to this extraordinary man, verily a hero.

Mahira Kakkar is a second-year drama student.