Gene Frankel

In 2003 Frankel made Gail Thacker Managing Director of the Gene Frankel Theatre and Film Workshop at the Bond Street location. Upon Frankel's death his legacy passed into Thacker's trust.

Frankel had two children, Laura Frankel and Ethan Frankel. His son, an aspiring actor, who studied at his father's school had struggled with psychiatric illness which led him to leap off the top of a Manhattan 17-floor-building in 1995 during a psychosis from which he survived. After a lengthy coma and therapy to learn to walk again Ethan was placed in a group home in the Bronx where he was murdered by a fellow resident the following year. Frankel created a scholarship at his theater in his son's name.

On August 4, 1973, his Mercer Arts Center, a complex of seven small theaters, which had been located on the first two floors of the residential Broadway Central Hotel, physically collapsed. Frankel, who had been conducting a rehearsal at the time, noticed the ceiling and walls beginning to buckle and heroically led the actors and several residents to safety; five people died in the collapse.

He began his own career as an actor and was one of the earliest members of the Actors Studio. He moved behind the scenes and became a theater director on and off Broadway. His most notable Broadway production was Arthur Kopit's Indians starring Stacy Keach, who was nominated for the 1970 Tony Award as Best Actor for his portrayal of Buffalo Bill. The production was also nominated for a Tony Award for best play of 1970.

His other Broadway productions included A Cry of Players (1968), Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars (1972) and Harry Chapin's The Night That Made America Famous (1975). His off-Broadway productions included Brecht on Brecht, (starring Viveca Lindfors, Lotte Lenya, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson), I Am a Woman (again with Lindfors), and To Be Young, Gifted and Black starring Cicely Tyson. He directed an Arthur Miller play when Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe.

Frankel's direction of the off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks was regarded as a crucial production in promoting African-American theater during the civil-rights movement which opened in 1961 and ran at St. Mark's Theatre for more than 1,400 performances, the longest-running Off-Broadway non-musical of the decade. The cast included James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone; sets were by Kim E. Swados, music by Charles Gross, and costumes and masks by Patricia Zipprodt.

Frankel was awarded the first Obie Award for directing, with his production of Volpone (1958) and then won two more also for directing. He also received the first Lola d'Annunzi and Vernon Rice awards for outstanding achievement in theater.

Eugene V. Frankel (December 23, 1919 – April 20, 2005) was an American actor, theater director, and acting teacher especially notable in the founding of the off-Broadway scene. Frankel served in the Army during World War II in entertainment and as a member of an aerial crew.