Ben Gazzara died on Friday, at the age of eighty-one. He’s one of the very greatest of film actors; he’ll be remembered for just a handful of roles, out of the one hundred thirty-three listed in IMDb, but those are among the very summits of movie history. I’m thinking, in particular, of his three films with John Cassavetes: “Husbands,” “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” and “Opening Night. In them (especially the first two) he plays varieties of himself, as Cassavetes saw him: the moderate man who loses his head and takes immoderate action. “Husbands,” in particular, finds Gazzara accomplishing one of the most astonishing, and moving, feats ever filmed: he steals a movie from Cassavetes and Peter Falk.

Cassavetes constructed the movie not around a script (though there was one) but around the three actors (and said that “the combination of three impossible people verging on lunacy appealed to me”); he pitched the project to Gazzara by shouting it at him across the Universal lot, and sold it to him definitively by screening “Faces” for him. As it turned out, “Husbands” is organized around Gazzara’s character, Harry, an advertising man; he and two of his three best friends go on a two-day bender after the funeral of their fourth friend, and Gazzara’s character—whom Cassavetes often accidentally called “Ben” while the camera was running—feels himself being closed out from the intimacy of the other two. He gives the movie its big emotional kicks—as in the famous vomiting-in-the-bathroom scene, when he challenges Archie (Falk) to a fight, roaring, “Nobody calls me a phony!” Cassavetes said (in Ray Carney’s “Cassavetes on Cassavetes”),

Gazzara’s character was continually frozen out by me and Falk—and Benny was really getting personally paranoid about it. In a three-person relationship there’s always one guy on the outside, and during the picture, Benny was usually it. It was amazing to watch the turmoil, to encourage it, to feed the battle that was raging…

With that sense of the outsider—the moderate-minded, less-crazy outsider—who faces his emotions for seemingly the first time, Gazzara erupts and delivers what is perhaps the founding moment in modern bromance: when, in another bar, he tells Archie and Gus (Cassavetes) (I approximate the dialogue from memory), “Aside from sex—and my wife is very good at it—I like you guys better,” and follows it with the inevitable (but, for 1970, still jolting), “Gus, I love you,” and “Archie, I love you”—followed by a big wet kiss on Archie’s cheek, and the also-inevitable defensive (and offensive) jokes about being, i.e, not being, gay.

Gazzara also has the movie’s most terrifying and ugly scene, which is also its decisive one—he returns to his house on Long Island, where he has a furious fight with his wife; he hits her, grabs his passport, and storms out of the house, vowing never to return. Harry decides to go to London, and coaxes his two friends to join him there on a freewheeling jaunt—and, once there, it’s his fragile state of mind—and lusty pursuit of sexual vengeance—that focusses his friends’ attention and governs the action. In short, he’s the core of a movie that’s at the core of the modern cinema, even of the modern psyche.

The movies are full of actors who bring joyful energy to larger-than-life heroes and others who plausibly, even movingly, embody the trimmer contours of ordinary people. Gazzara did that rarest of things: he invested an utterly regular guy and everyday person with terrifyingly intense, sudden, and grand emotions; he bound together stylish nobility and selfish voracity, exquisite tenderness and animal rawness. What he didn’t do was look at his actions in the inner mirror; he came of age before the era of self-criticism, which may be why, as a performer, he seemed to age faster than others who were only a little younger—and why his image has, justly, remained both titanic and untouchable, an object of nostalgia and of menace.

Cassavetes died in 1989; Falk died last year; Gazzara, the last man, is gone now, too.