Judith Malina - Career

Career

In 1963 they had to close the Living Theatre because of IRS charges (later proved false) of tax problems, and Malina and Beck were convicted of contempt of court. They received a five-year suspended sentence, and decided to leave the U.S. The company spent the next five years touring in Europe and creating increasingly radical works, culminating in Paradise Now. They returned to the US in 1968 to present their new work. In her book The Enormous Despair (1972), part of her series of published diaries, Malina expressed the sense of danger and unfamiliarity she felt on returning to the U.S. in the midst of the social upheavals of the late 1960s.

In 1969 the company decided to divide into three groups. One worked on the pop scene in London, another went to India to study traditional Indian theatre arts, and the third, including Malina and Beck, traveled in 1971 to Brazil to tour. They were imprisoned there on political charges for two months by the military government.

After Beck's death from cancer in 1985, company member Hanon Reznikov, who had become Malina's lover (they married in 1988), assumed co-leadership of the company. In 2007 it opened its own theater at 21 Clinton Street in Manhattan. In April 2008 Reznikov suffered a stroke, and while hospitalized, he died of pneumonia on May 3 at the age of 57.

Malina appeared occasionally in films, beginning in 1975, when she played Al Pacino's mother in Dog Day Afternoon. Other roles include in Pacino's Looking for Richard. She played Grandma Addams in The Addams Family (1991), and had major roles in Household Saints (1993) and the low-budget film, Nothing Really Happens (2003). She appeared in an episode of long-running TV series The Sopranos in 2006.