Byrne Piven, 72; Influential Acting Teacher, Director

Byrne Piven, an actor and director whose work as a teacher of theater influenced generations of Chicago-area actors, including John Cusack and his sister Joan, has died. He was 72.

Piven died Monday of complications from lung cancer at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Ill.

With his wife, Joyce, a director and actress, Piven established an acting workshop in Evanston that during its 30 years shaped the work of such prominent stage and film actors as the Cusacks and their sister Ann; Lili Taylor; Aidan Quinn; and the Pivens’ two children, Shira and Jeremy.

At the same time, Piven kept up his own career as a director and actor, appearing in dozens of television shows and films.

“He had been doing six shows a week playing King Lear at our theater in Evanston last summer in a production that our daughter, Shira, directed, and he was loving every minute of it,” Joyce Piven said. She added: “Then, in November, we found he had lung cancer, and after that, it went quickly.”

Born in Scranton, Pa., Piven went to work as an actor in New York but moved to Chicago in 1954.

“I bumped into Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Ed Asner, Barbara Harris and Sheldon Patinkin, and we all started the wonderful Playwright’s Theatre Club,” he said.

From that company, Second City and the Compass Players emerged.

Joyce Piven, who met her husband at the Playwright’s Theatre Club and married him in 1954, said they left Chicago in 1955 to work and study in New York, but they returned in 1967 to appear in the short-lived Second City Repertory company.

The couple later set up their acting workshop in Evanston.

Their students included all five Cusack children as well as the Pivens’ children.

Shira Piven lives and works with her husband, Second City alumnus Adam McKay, in New York with their daughter.

Jeremy Piven has made a successful career for himself in television and movies, including “Black Hawk Down,” and often works with his boyhood friend John Cusack.

Near the end of his life, in a tribute to Byrne Piven’s influence in their lives, several former students flew to Chicago to be with him. The Cusacks and Quinn were at the hospital, along with about 20 other friends.

“When John [Cusack] first went into the movies, people remarked how well-prepared he was for such a young actor,” his father, Richard Cusack, said. “That all came from what he had learned with Joyce and Byrne at the Piven Theatre Workshop.”

John Cusack, who spent several hours with Piven in the hospital, said: “He was very ill, but he had such a big heart that he sort of willed himself into consciousness while we all were there. We needed to tell him how much he had meant to us.”