John Garfield (born Jacob Julius Garfinkle; March 4, 1913 – May 21, 1952) was an American actor who played brooding, rebellious, working-class characters.

[5] His father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, struggled to make a living and to provide even marginal comfort for his small family.

She died two years later, and the young boys were sent to live with various relatives, all poor, scattered across the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx.

[2] Noticing Garfield's tendency to stammer, Patri assigned him to a speech therapy class taught by a charismatic teacher named Margaret O'Ryan.

At one of the latter, he received back-stage congratulations and an offer of support from the Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami, who recommended him to the American Laboratory Theatre.

[5] Funded by the Theatre Guild, "the Lab" had contracted with Richard Boleslavski to stage its experimental productions and with Russian actress and expatriate Maria Ouspenskaya to supervise classes in acting.

Garfield took morning classes and began volunteering time at the Lab after hours, auditing rehearsals, building and painting scenery, and doing crew work.

Among the people becoming disenchanted with the Guild and turning to the Lab for a more radical, challenging environment were Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Franchot Tone, Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman.

After a stint with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater and a short period of vagrancy, involving hitchhiking, freight hopping, picking fruit, and logging in the U.S. Northwest, (Preston Sturges conceived the film Sullivan's Travels after hearing Garfield tell of his hobo adventures),[6] Garfield made his Broadway debut in 1932 in a play called Lost Boy.

[7] Garfield received feature billing in his next role, that of Henry the office boy in Elmer Rice's play Counsellor-at-Law, starring Paul Muni.

The play ran for three months, made an Eastern tour and returned for an unprecedented second, repeat engagement, only closing when Muni was contractually compelled to go back to Hollywood to make a film for Warners.

After Odets' one-act play Waiting for Lefty became a surprise hit, the Group announced it would mount a production of his full-length drama Awake and Sing.

The play opened in February 1935, and Garfield was singled out by critic Brooks Atkinson for having a "splendid sense of character development".

That play would turn out to be Golden Boy, but when Luther Adler was cast in the lead role instead, a disillusioned Garfield began to take a second look at the overtures being made by Hollywood.

[3] Garfield had been approached by Hollywood studios before—both Paramount and Warners offering screen tests—but talks had always stalled over a clause he wanted inserted in his contract, one that would allow him time off for stage work.

After many false starts, he was finally cast in a supporting, yet crucial role as a tragic young composer in a Michael Curtiz film titled Four Daughters (1938).

Not wanting their new star to appear in a low-budget film, Warners ordered an A movie upgrade by adding $100,000 to its budget and recalling director Michael Curtiz to shoot newly scripted scenes.

He didn't recite dialogue, he attacked it until it lost the quality of talk and took on the nature of speech ... Like Cagney, he was an exceptionally mobile performer from the start of his screen career.

The film did well critically, but failed to find an audience, the public being dissatisfied that it was not a true sequel (hard to pull off, since the original character Mickey Borden died in the first picture).

[6] At the onset of World War II, Garfield immediately attempted to enlist in the armed forces, but was turned down because of his heart condition.

He and actress Bette Davis were the driving forces behind the opening of the Hollywood Canteen, a club offering food and entertainment for American servicemen.

He traveled overseas to help entertain the troops, made several bond selling tours and starred in a string of patriotic box-office successes like Air Force, Destination Tokyo (both 1943) and Pride of the Marines (1945).

After the war, Garfield starred in a series of successful films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) with Lana Turner, Humoresque (also 1946) with Joan Crawford, and Gentleman's Agreement (1947), an Oscar-winning Best Picture.

He was blacklisted in Red Channels and barred from future employment as an actor by Hollywood movie studio bosses for the remainder of his career.

[2] With film work scarce because of the blacklist, Garfield returned to Broadway and starred in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy, finally being cast in the lead role denied him years before.

[6] On the morning of May 20, Garfield, against his doctor's strict orders, played several strenuous sets of tennis with a friend, mentioning the fact that he had not been to bed the night before.

'"[15] In The Exorcist (1973), Detective Kinderman says Father Damien Karras "looks like a boxer", and more specifically John Garfield as he appeared in Body and Soul.

The protagonist in Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice, Larry "Doc" Sportello, discusses Garfield's film appearances throughout the detective story.

Garfield is a character in Names, Mark Kemble's play about former Group Theatre members' struggles with the House Un-American Activities Committee.