Martin Balsam (12 Angry Men) 12 Angry Men (1957)

Martin Balsam (1919–1996) played the Foreman (Juror 1) in 12 Angry Men (1957) — the high-school football coach trying to run an orderly meeting and slowly losing the room to its own arguments.

Balsam was an Actor's Studio member with a face built for second-tier authority

Balsam was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and trained at the Actor's Studio under Lee Strasberg in the late 1940s. He arrived in New York theater and live television in the early 1950s and was a familiar character-actor face by the time 12 Angry Men was cast. He had played a small role in On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan) and several Reginald Rose teleplays at Studio One. He would go on to one of American film's longest character-actor careers — Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), as Detective Arbogast on the staircase; A Thousand Clowns (1965), winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar; The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), as Mr. Green opposite Walter Matthau (see Martin Balsam in that wiki).

"Martin Balsam was the man American directors called when they needed someone to anchor a scene. He never stole a picture and he never disappeared from one." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1996 obituary)

The Foreman is the picture's procedural baseline

The Foreman has the least dramatic part of the twelve. He calls votes. He hands out ballots. He manages the apartment diagram. He counts hands. He accepts each new state of the count. Balsam plays him as a man who has volunteered for a job and is determined to do it correctly without fully understanding why the room keeps making it harder. There is one quiet moment — beat 20, after the 8–4 vote — where Juror 12 (Robert Webber) playfully challenges his right to remain foreman; Balsam's dignified defense of the role, said as a man who has been losing the room all afternoon, lands as the picture's only moment of gentle institutional pathos.

"Balsam's foreman is the most underrated performance in the film. He has nothing to do but keep order, and he keeps it the way an honest man keeps order: with steady patience and small wounded glances." — Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic (1957) (paywalled archive)

Balsam's working friendship with Lumet was long

Sidney Lumet (in 12 Angry Men) and Balsam knew each other from live television. Balsam had appeared in several Lumet-directed teleplays in the early 1950s. The casting was based on that established trust — Lumet needed a foreman who would not try to make the part bigger than it was, and Balsam was the actor who would not. The two reunited on The Anderson Tapes (1971), with Sean Connery, fourteen years later.

After 12 Angry Men, the career filled in steadily

Balsam worked constantly — Psycho (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961, as Mr. Yunioshi's Hollywood agent O.J. Berman), Cape Fear (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), A Thousand Clowns (1965, Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Hombre (1967), Catch-22 (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), All the President's Men (1976), and steady television work through the 1980s. He died in Rome in 1996, where he had been working on a film.

Selected filmography

Year	Film	Role	Notes
1954	On the Waterfront	Gillette
1957	12 Angry Men	Foreman (Juror 1)
1960	Psycho	Det. Arbogast	Hitchcock
1962	Cape Fear	District Attorney
1965	A Thousand Clowns	Arnold Burns	Best Supporting Actor Oscar
1971	The Anderson Tapes	Tommy Haskins	Lumet
1974	The Taking of Pelham One Two Three	Mr. Green
1976	All the President's Men	Howard Simons