Elia Kazan, who almost single-handedly yanked American theatre and film into the real world has died at 94. The director of such seminal works as One The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire also caved in to the demands of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 1950s, betraying fellow artists in an effort to save his own career.

Elia Kazan was born in 1909 in Istanbul (then Constantinople) and came to the US with his family at the age of four. The family settled in Harlem but the young Kazan elected not to join his father's carpet business, instead gravitating towards the theatre. In the 1930s he became a member of the Group Theatre, along with such other luminaries as Orson Welles and Arthur Miller. It was during this period that, like many others of his generation, he joined the Communist Party. Kazan grew disillusioned, however, and left the party in 1935.

By the early 1940s he had become a force to be reckoned with in New York theatre, directing the work of such young writers as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets. He brought his Group Theatre sensibility to Hollywood with his first film Boomerang in 1947, but it was his second film Gentleman's Agreement (also 1947) that catapulted him to international renown.

At a time when the US film industry was struggling to compete with the new medium of television, Kazan rejected glamour and brought a gritty realism to the form. Films like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On The Waterfront (1954) presented morally ambiguous characters living desperate lives in surroundings familiar to most filmgoers. Kazan seemed destined for a glittering career, but if he had the good luck to be working during a vibrant period of artistic growth in America, he also had the misfortune of being around during one of her most paranoid periods.

The crusade against Communism fostered by Sentaor Joe McCarthy cast a pall over the 1950s, and the House Un-American Activities Committe destroyed hundreds of lives. Simply being called to testify was enough to destroy a career. By the time the committe turned its jaundiced eye on Hollywood, the industry was quaking. Some, such as the famous Hollywood Ten, stood by their principles and suffered years out in the cold under the studio-imposed blacklist. Many artists left the US and declined to return even after the committee was discredited. The only way to escape being blacklisted was to "name names", that is to give the committee the names of other people who were "Communists". When he was called to testify, Kazan did what the committee wanted and informed on his friends and colleagues.

That decision would haunt his life from that point on. Although the director felt that the experience forced him to mature, and he did make many good films after his testimony, he would never regain his early stature in the industry. As late as 1999, when he was awarded a special Academy Award for lifetime acievement, his 1950s betrayal still colored the attitudes of critics. Although championed by such luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Kazan's appearance at the ceremony was bittersweet for the aging director. Some in the audience gave him the requisite standing ovation, but many sat silently.

Ultimately, however, his act of self-preservation will slip into the mists of time and, as with other artists before him, what will remain will be the art. Elia Kazan reintroduced American audiences to reality and to the raw emotion of living; his films examined the ugliness of everyday life as well as its beauty, and he developed a language which almost every filmmaker alive today must learn and speak. And that's not a bad legacy.