Elia Kazan Trivia
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59 free Elia Kazan trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Elia Kazan launched Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint, directed the Broadway premieres of A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, and won two Oscars for directing. He also named eight friends before a congressional committee in 1952 and spent the rest of his life defending it. This quiz covers all of it. It starts with the boy from Constantinople with the pot-maker surname, the Williams College nickname, the Group Theatre mentors who said he could not act, and the studio he co-founded that made the Method the house style of postwar Hollywood. The film questions run from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Gentleman's Agreement through Streetcar, Viva Zapata!, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, Splendor in the Grass and America America to The Last Tycoon, with the writers, composers, debuts and casting stories behind each. Then the politics: the Communist Party years, the HUAC testimony, the New York Times ad, Orson Welles's verdict and the divided room at the 1999 Academy Awards. Easy questions suit anyone who knows the big films; the expert tier reaches Sandy Hook, Malcolm Johnson and the Methodist church where the Actors Studio first met. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Kazan, his films and his collaborators, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Elia Kazan born in 1909?
Constantinople
Constantinople, now Istanbul, was only his first home: his father went ahead to New York and sent for the family, who followed shortly before the First World War.
Q 02Kazan's family belonged to which ethnic community of Anatolia?
Greek
Greek: his parents were Anatolian Greeks living under Ottoman rule, and he traced to that past the guarded 'Anatolian smile' he disliked in his father, 'the smile that covers resentment'.
Q 03Which 1951 Kazan film of a Pulitzer-winning Southern Gothic play made Marlon Brando a star?
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Streetcar Named Desire became the first film to win three acting Oscars, yet Brando, who had played Stanley for Kazan on Broadway, was its one acting nominee to lose.
Q 04Which actor made his starring debut in Kazan's 1955 film "East of Eden"?
James Dean
James Dean was killed in a car crash six months after its release, making this the only one of his three starring films to come out in his lifetime.
Q 05Which 1954 Kazan film about corruption in a longshoremen's union won eight Oscars?
On the Waterfront
On the Waterfront has a hero who testifies against his own union bosses, and many critics read it as Kazan justifying his decision to name names; he said he was speaking for the underdog.
Q 06Kazan won his first Best Director Oscar for which 1947 film about antisemitism, starring Gregory Peck?
Gentleman's Agreement
Gentleman's Agreement casts Peck as a reporter who poses as Jewish to expose polite prejudice from the inside; it won Best Picture as well as the directing prize.
Q 07Which New York workshop, later the home of the Method, did Kazan co-found in 1947?
The Actors Studio
The Actors Studio began with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis as his partners, and its training went on to reshape American screen acting, often in his own films.
Q 08Before which congressional body did Kazan give the 1952 testimony that shadowed his later life?
The House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee heard him twice in 1952: first he refused to name anyone, then, warned his film career was at stake, he named eight former stage colleagues.
Q 09What is the title of Kazan's 1988 autobiography?
A Life
A Life defends his 1952 testimony at length yet admits doubt: what he had done was correct, he wrote, but was it right?
Q 10Which actor debuted as drifter "Lonesome" Rhodes in Kazan's 1957 satire "A Face in the Crowd"?
Andy Griffith
Andy Griffith, later TV's gentle Sheriff Andy Taylor, made his film debut as a folksy drifter turned demagogue; Kazan meant the film as a warning about television's power in politics.
Q 11Which actor's film debut came opposite Natalie Wood in Kazan's "Splendor in the Grass" (1961)?
Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty challenged Kazan in the first week of shooting about naming names; the director pulled him into a dressing room and justified himself for two hours.
Q 12Kazan's testimony cost him the friendship of which playwright, whose 1949 play he had directed?
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller refused to name names when his own turn came, and the two were estranged for a decade before Kazan staged his 'After the Fall' in 1964.
Q 13Which actor, the star of Kazan's final film, helped present his controversial Honorary Oscar in 1999?
Robert De Niro
Q 21Kazan's first feature film, released in 1945, was an adaptation of which Betty Smith novel?
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
He had made two short films first; the feature began his habit of choosing dramas about contemporary social concerns.
Q 22Kazan's 1949 film "Pinky" drew controversy for casting which actress as a Black woman passing for white?
Jeanne Crain
Jeanne Crain earned an Oscar nomination; Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge had both wanted the part, and Kazan, brought in after John Ford left, thought her miscast.
Q 23Kazan's 1950 thriller 'Panic in the Streets', shot in New Orleans, is a race to stop an outbreak of what?
Pneumonic plague
Robert De Niro shared the stage with a director friend; part of the audience stood to applaud while others, among them Nick Nolte and Ed Harris, stayed seated and did not clap.
Q 14In which city in New Jersey did Kazan shoot the 1954 film that won Marlon Brando an Oscar as Terry Malloy?
Hoboken
Hoboken was Frank Sinatra's home town, and he had a handshake deal to play the lead until Brando, who had first turned it down, changed his mind.
Q 15Which composer wrote his only original film score for Kazan's 1954 longshoremen drama?
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was nominated for the Oscar but lost to Dimitri Tiomkin, one of the few defeats for the film on a night when it won eight awards.
Q 16Which college nickname did Kazan keep for life, earned, he said, by being small, compact and handy to have around?
Gadg
Gadg, short for Gadget, was taken up by his stars, Brando among them, but Kazan grew to despise it; a friend told him it suited a man useful to everyone except himself.
Q 17Where did Kazan study for two years before moving to New York in 1932?
Yale School of Drama
Yale School of Drama came after Williams College, where he waited tables to pay his way and felt shut out by wealthier classmates; that outsider's anger, he said, drove him for life.
Q 18Kazan's first professional home was which socially committed 1930s New York company?
The Group Theatre
The Group Theatre treated the stage as a collective art; Kazan later decided it had been wrong, and that a production should express one person's vision.
Q 19Kazan made his name as an actor playing a strike-leading taxi driver in which 1935 Clifford Odets play?
Waiting for Lefty
Waiting for Lefty is staged as a cab drivers' union meeting with the audience as its members; critics called Kazan 'dynamic', though he had been told early on that he had no talent for acting.
Q 20Which 1942 Thornton Wilder play starring Tallulah Bankhead gave Kazan his first big Broadway success?
The Skin of Our Teeth
The Skin of Our Teeth was a battle as well as a hit: Bankhead clashed with her director, and Kazan later wrote that she was one of only two people he ever hated.
Pneumonic plague is carried by a murdered man, giving a health officer 48 hours to find his killers before it spreads; Jack Palance made his film debut as one of them.
Q 24Who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Zapata's brother Eufemio in Kazan's 1952 biopic?
Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn, born in Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution itself, took the Oscar, while Brando, nominated for playing Zapata, went home without one.
Q 25Which actress won her second Best Actress Oscar as Blanche DuBois in Kazan's 1951 film?
Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh had played Blanche on the London stage under her husband Laurence Olivier's direction, and was the one lead Kazan did not bring from his Broadway cast.
Q 26Which actress originated Blanche DuBois on Broadway for Kazan, only to lose the part in his 1951 film?
Jessica Tandy
Jessica Tandy won a Tony for the role, and Kazan wanted her for the film, but the producer insisted on a bigger box-office name; her fellow leads all kept their parts.
Q 27Which screenwriter wrote both Kazan's 1954 dockside drama and "A Face in the Crowd"?
Budd Schulberg
Budd Schulberg had himself named names to Congress in 1951, a year before Kazan, after a former comrade identified him as an ex-Communist.
Q 28Kazan's 1956 film "Baby Doll" was condemned by which Catholic watchdog for its implied sexuality?
The National Legion of Decency
The National Legion of Decency condemned it, and New York's Cardinal Spellman called the film 'revolting' and urged Catholics and non-Catholics alike to stay away.
Q 29In Kazan's 1960 film "Wild River", a matriarch refuses to sell her island to which agency?
The Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority must clear her island before a new dam floods it; Montgomery Clift plays the agent who comes to respect the old woman he has to evict.
Q 30Kazan's 1963 film "America America" dramatises the journey to the United States of which relative?
His uncle
His uncle Avraam set out as a boy with the family's savings, lost them on the way, and still reached New York, where he later brought Kazan's father over.