Jerry Zaks

Jerry Zaks

Birth : 1946-09-07, Stuttgart, Germany

History

Jerry Zaks (born September 7, 1946) is a German-born American stage and television director, and actor. He won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play and Drama Desk Award for directing The House of Blue Leaves, Lend Me A Tenor, and Six Degrees of Separation and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and Drama Desk Award for Guys and Dolls.

Profile

Jerry Zaks

Movies

Love Letters
Director
Andrew Makepeace Ladd III wrote his first letter to Melissa Gardner to tell her she looked like a lost princess. They were both seven years old. For the next fifty years, through personal triumphs and despair, through wars and marriages and children and careers, they poured out the secrets of their hearts to each other. They defied a fate that schemed to keep them apart and lived—through letters—or the one most meaningful thing, their undying love for each other.
Who Do You Love
Director
Who Do You Love is the life story of legendary record producer Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records in Chicago, IL, the label that helped popularize blues music during the 1950s and ’60s.
Smokey Joe's Cafe: The Songs of Leiber and Stoller
Stage Director
Smokey Joe's Cafe, Broadway's longest-running musical revue, highlights the best songs by the legendary song-writing duo, Leiber and Stoller. Included numbers are "Neighborhood", "Fools Fall In Love", "Yakety Yak", "Charlie Brown", "Jailhouse Rock", "Hound Dog", "Love Potion #9" and "Stand By Me".
Marvin's Room
Director
A leukemia patient attempts to end a 20-year feud with her sister to get her bone marrow.
O. Henry's Christmas
Director
Three episodes based on O. Henry's texts. The first deals with the friendship between a painter and two young women. The second, a young man who receives an insignificant amount of his uncle, as an inheritance. The third concerns two people who make it all possible when they give themselves love as Christmas presents.
Guys And Dolls: Off The Record
Himself
A behind-the-scenes look at the cast-album recording session of the 1992 Tony-winning Broadway revival of the Frank Loesser musical. Originally broadcast as part of the PBS series "Great Performances" (season 21, episode 4).
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Man on Campus
An ophthalmologist's mistress threatens to reveal their affair to his wife, while a married documentary filmmaker is infatuated by another woman.
The House of Blue Leaves
Stage Director
On the day in 1965 that the Pope visits New York and masses of people line the streets in adulation, Artie, a zookeeper living in Sunnyside, Queens, thinks it's time for his life to be blessed, too. He desperately wants to escape his lower middle-class existence and become a popular singer and songwriter, but his life is complicated by an ambitious mistress, a crazy wife and a bomb-making son.
Outrageous Fortune
Tobacco Clerk
Refined actress Lauren Ames finally has a chance to study with the great theatre professor Stanislav Korzenowski. Sandy Brozinsky, a brash, loud actress, decides through happenstance to also study with Korzenowski. The two women end up dating the same man (who turns out to be a double agent) and follow him across the country to force him to choose between them.
The Gentleman Bandit
Carl Schnee
Based on the real-life ordeal of Baltimore priest Bernard Pagano, who was accused of several armed robberies in the late Seventies.
Tintypes
Debuting on Broadway in 1980, Tintypes is a musical review featuring songs from the early twentieth century providing the audience with a look into that turbulent time in American history. Nominated for three Tony Awards, and winner of several Obie Awards, this production stars Carolyn Mignini, Lynne Thigpen, Trey Wilson, Mary Catherine Wright, and Jerry Zaks.
Attica
Lenny Becker
Acclaimed dramatization recreating the incidents surrounding the 1971 revolt in New York's Attica State Prison that lasted for 23 days and resulted in the greatest casualty toll between Americans since the Civil War.