Jakob Garfein[1] (July 2, 1930 – December 30, 2019) was an American film and theatre director, acting teacher, and a key figure of the Actors Studio.

He put on its first-ever play to move to Broadway, End as a Man (1953), and expanded the influence of Method Acting to Hollywood with the founding of Actors Studio West, alongside Paul Newman, in 1966.

He was a teacher to actors Sissy Spacek, Ron Perlman, Irène Jacob, James Thierrée, Laetitia Casta, and Samuel Le Bihan.

He directed Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Shelley Winters, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Ralph Meeker, Mark Richman, Mildred Dunnock, and Elaine Stritch, and discovered Steve McQueen, Bruce Dern, George Peppard, Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Albert Salmi, and Paul Richards.

The Strange One was censored by the Motion Picture Production Code for general "homosexual overtones" and "excessive brutality and suggestive sequences [that] tend to arouse disrespect for lawful authority."

In 1948, Piscator cast him as the lead in his production of "The Burning Bush," the story of a young boy from an Orthodox Jewish family accused of committing blood libel by the antisemitic members of the Hungarian aristocracy.

In the following years, some of his early jobs as theater director included productions such as Arthur Laurents' Home of the Brave (1950) and Oscar Wilde's Birthday of the Infanta (1949), in which he had the lead role.

After graduating at the age of 20, he was hired by NBC to direct 15-minute dramatic segments on television for The Kate Smith Hour with Barry Nelson, Phyllis Love, and Donald Buka, who were exciting new actors on Broadway at the time.Impressed by Garfein's stage production of Alexandre Dumas's Camille (La Dame aux Camélias), Strasberg invited him to attend the Actors Studio for a year.

Garfein's numerous off-Broadway credits include Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie (1966), Eugène Ionesco's California Reich and The Lesson (1978–79), Arthur Miller'sThe Price and The American Clock (1979-1980), Anton Chekhov's Sketchbook with Joseph Bulof and John Herd (1981), Alan Schneider's Catastrophe (1983), Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, What Where, and Endgame (1983–84), Nathalie Saurraute's For No Good Reason (1985) and Childhood (1985), starring Glenn Close, A Kurt Weill Cabaret with Alvin Epstein and Marta Schlamme (1985), Gastón Salvatore's Stalin (1989), Ekkehard Schall's plays for the Brecht Theater, and South African playwright Athol Fugard's Master Harold (1985), which premiered in France at the Théâtre du Rond-Point.

Maintaining a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Garfein, Beckett gave him the world premiere stage rights to his popular television play Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams, 1982).

Adapted from his theatre production of End as a Man (1953),[7] Garfein's film directorial debut, The Strange One (1957), is an ensemble piece set in a sadistic Southern military academy.

As noted by critic Foster Hirsch,[10] the film bears disturbing echoes of the Nazi fascism Garfein witnessed firsthand, with its focus on a cruel yet charismatic cadet, Jocko de Paris, who coerces his peers into covering up a vicious hazing incident at the school.

In racially segregated America of 1957, the studio objected on the grounds that to use black actors would mean commercial failure by causing the film to lose distribution in the South.

In the film, his then-wife Carroll Baker plays as a young rape victim held captive by the man (Ralph Meeker) who rescues her from suicide.

As Joshua Brunsting of CriterionCast writes, "Garnering great support in Europe, many have compared Garfein's film to the works of Ingmar Bergman, and that's about as perfect a comparison as one could make.

Several years later, Garfein directed an episode of the first prime time network color television series The Marriage, which aired on NBC from July to August 1954.

He opened the Actors and Directors Lab in New York in 1974, a drama school where several well-known figures studied, including Sissy Spacek, Paul Schrader, Tom Schulman, and Phil Alden Robinson.