MINI BIO
Date of Birth: June 4th 1926
Malina met her long-time collaborator and husband, Julian Beck, when she was 17. Beck, originally a painter, came to share her interest in political theatre, and in 1947 the two founded The Living Theatre, which they directed together until Beck's death in 1985. Malina's and Beck's marriage was as unconventional as their work: Beck was bisexual and had a male partner, and Malina was involved with a series of men. The couple had two children--daughter, Isha, and a son, Garrick.
When the company ran afoul of the IRS in 1963, the theatre was seized by the government, 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, which they returned to the U.S. to present in 1968. Malina's book The Enormous Despair (1972), part of her series of diaries, records 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.
When the main Living Theatre company disbanded in 1969, Malina and Beck continued to work together, and in 1971 they traveled with other company members to Brazil, where they were imprisoned for two months on political charges. On returning to New York, they reconstituted a new Living Theatre group. After Beck's death from cancer, company member Hanon Reznikov, who had become Malina's lover (they married in 1988), assumed co-leadership of the company, which opened its own theater in 2007 at 21 Clinton Street in Manhattan. In April of 2008 Reznikov suffered a stroke, and while hospitalized he died of pneumonia on May 3 at the age of 57.
Malina's occasional film career began in 1975, when she had a small role in Dog Day Afternoon and later briefly appeared in Al Pacino's Looking for Richard. She played larger roles in the movies The Addams Family (1991), Household Saints (1993) and in the low-budget production Nothing Really Happens (2003). She appeared in an episode of The Sopranos in 2006.
