Israel Horovitz (March 31, 1939 – November 9, 2020) was an American playwright, director, actor and co-founder of the Gloucester Stage Company in 1979.
He was the founder of the New York Playwrights Lab, and his best-known plays include Line, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, and The Indian Wants the Bronx.
[4] At age 13, he wrote his first novel, which was rejected by Simon & Schuster but complimented for its "wonderful, childlike qualities.
[2] He worked as a taxi driver, a stagehand and an advertising executive before having his first success in the theatre with his play The Indian Wants the Bronx, which featured two yet-undiscovered future film stars: John Cazale and Al Pacino.
Following his debut, about which The New York Post's Jerry Tallmer wrote "Welcome, Mr. Horovitz," Random House published a collection of four of his plays, entitled First Season (1968).
Horovitz wrote two novels: Cappella (Harper and Row) and Guignol's Legacy (Three Rooms Press); a novella, Nobody Loves Me (Les Editions de Minuit); and a collection of poetry, Heaven and Others Poems (Three Rooms Press).
Other Horovitz-penned films include the award-winning Sunshine, co-written with Istvan Szabo (European Academy Award – Best Screenplay), 3 Weeks After Paradise (which he directed and in which he starred), James Dean, an award-winning biography of the actor, and The Strawberry Statement (Prix du Jury, Cannes Film festival, 1970), a movie adapted from a journalistic novel by James Simon Kunen that deals with the student political unrest of the 1960s.
[13] Horovitz adapted his stage play[14] My Old Lady for the screen, which he directed in summer, 2013, starring Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Dominique Pinon.
In 1993, The Boston Phoenix published an article which covered a series of accusations against Horovitz by six different women associated with the GSC.
[20] On November 30, 2017, a New York Times article stated that nine women said that Horovitz had sexually assaulted or harassed them between 1986 and 2016.