For many years Kazan ran two distinguished careers in parallel, alternating between the New York stage and films, and establishing himself as one of America’s greatest and most creative directors in both spheres.

As a director he became renowned for his crusading against the social and racial injustices in American society, expressed in intelligent and well-crafted films.

Besides his work behind the camera, perhaps his most striking contribution to both the theatre and cinema was in his co-founding the influential Actors Studio, which was responsible for developing the Method style, evolved by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1920s.

Though the Method had been known in America from the 1930s, when it was adopted by the left-wing Group Theatre, the founding of the Actors Studio in 1947 gave it its great momentum.

Kazan, who was later joined at the Actors Studio by Lee Strasberg, who became its director in 1950, helped to launch the careers of a generation of fine players - most notably Marlon Brando - who used the Method as the basis of their technique.

In the cinema Kazan directed several films in the social realist mode which laid bare the tensions and prejudices in American society. In a career that covered four decades, he was responsible for some of the most creative filmwork to come out of America, always remaining committed to his belief that the medium could, and should, be an art form.

From the mid-1960s he turned his back on the theatre, saying that it could no longer be the proper vehicle for modern preoccupations. From the middle of the following decade, he appeared to be equally disillusioned with the cinema, feeling that it had become simply a cog in a vast American entertainment industry, and as such, was losing its power to be a medium of artistic expression. From this time on he was able to devote more of his time to what was effectively his third career - as a novelist, in which he found great fulfilment. In his books he was able to use fiction to reflect his own background as the son of immigrants.

Inexplicably to colleagues in the film industry who had shared his ideals (like him many of them had been members of the Communist Party in the 1930s), Kazan was to commit what many still consider one of the great ideological betrayals in American performing arts history. In the early 1950s he informed the House Un-American Activities Committee, then engaged in a witch-hunt against communism, that he would do "anything you consider valuable or necessary to help".

He was always to defend his actions by claiming that as a liberal, he felt that the secrecy that aided communism posed a threat to the very existence of a free and democratic United States. (Lillian Hellman described this stance as "pious shit", and remained firmly of the opinion that Kazan was concerned only with saving his own creative skin.)

Be that as it may, Kazan’s "help" to the committee included his naming of a number of prominent figures who either had, or had had, links with the Communist Party. All of these were blacklisted and most of them had their creative lives ruined as a result. Those who had careers blighted by Kazan’s revelations - and the many more who came to grief because they were named by others - never forgave such a man as Kazan for his part in the betrayal. When, in 1999, it was decided to award Kazan an honorary Oscar for his lifetime of achievement, the announcement was greeted with repugnance in many quarters. At the ceremony, in March of that year, several members of the audience conspicuously refused to clap.

Elia Kazan was born Elia Kazanjoglou in 1909 in Constantinople into a Greek family that emigrated to New York when he was a child. He was educated at Mayfair School; New Rochelle School, New York; and Williams College, Massachusetts, where he graduated BA in 1930.

From there he went to Yale Drama School, where he studied from 1930 to 1932. Then, in the early 1930s he joined the left-wing Group Theatre, working first as an actor and later turning to direction. Between 1934 and 1936 he was a member of the Communist Party and he retained a social commitment that was evident in much of his work.

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