Julian Beck

A bold, innovative, avant-garde figure in theatre who helped revolutionized the style of playwriting and acting in the 1950s and 1960s, actor/writer/producer/directer Julian Beck was certainly a odd-looking sort with his baleful, hollow eyes, stark and skullish features and near-bald dome capped by long fringes of stringy hair along the side. He could have easily given inspiration to the creepy look Richard O'Brien gave his bizarre character in "The Rocky Horror Show." Born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, Julian was the son of Irving, a businessman, and Mabel Lucille (Blum) Beck. Educated at the College of the City of New York, he briefly attended Yale University, but then abandoned it to pursue writing and art. An abstract expressionist painter in the 1940s, his life's destiny was forever changed after meeting his future wife, actress/writer/director Judith Malina, in 1943. His passions swiftly centered around the likes of hers -- the theatre -- and t