Jay Kanter, the high-powered Hollywood agent who represented , and and served as the inspiration for ’s character in the classic Billy Wilder film , died Tuesday. He was 97. Kanter died at his home in Beverly Hills, a spokesperson for the Independent Artist Group announced.
His son Adam is a partner at IAG. A favorite of mighty Music Corporation of America mogul Lew Wasserman, Kanter also spent seven years in England in the 1960s greenlighting European movies for Universal, produced films including the -starring (1972) and had a long business relationship with at Fox and MGM. When Brando was slumming around Paris after breaking out on Broadway in in the late 1940s, Kanter‚ then an MCA junior agent, received a call from producer Stanley Kramer saying he wanted to hire the actor to make his film debut in (1950) as a paralyzed ex-G.
I. Kanter was not the budding superstar’s agent — Edith Van Cleve was — but he picked him up at a train station and took him to the home of Brando’s aunt and uncle in San Marino, California, and they all had dinner. The next day, Kanter drove the actor to a meeting with Kramer, director Fred Zinnemann and writer Carl Foreman, then asked him to come to the MCA office so he could meet the other agents.
Brando told him, “‘I don’t have to meet anybody, you’re my agent,’” Kanter in 2017. When Wasserman heard the story, “He really got a kick out of it because he was getting telephone calls from Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, these .