Biografía

He was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist during the HUAC hearings. Although he had already been signed, 20th Century-Fox wanted to remove him from Ultimátum a la Tierra (1951). Producer Julian Blaustein felt that Jaffe was so crucial for the role of the Albert Einstein-like Prof. Barnhardt that he appealed to studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Zanuck approved Jaffe for the role, but it was his last Hollywood film until the late 1950s.

His nephew by his older brother Abraham Jaffe, was named after him. Both Sam Jaffes worked for ABC in the 1960's. The elder actor on Ben Casey and the younger nephew as ABC News Bureau Chief in Moscow and then Hong Kong. ABC put out a press release about the two Sam Jaffes'. There is an extensive & fascinating biography, Sam Jaffe, An Actor of Character written by his friend Arlene Lorrance. 2013 LP Publications His great niece is the photographer Deborah Jaffe.

Was in two Oscar Best Picture winners: La barrera invisible (1947) and Ben-Hur (1959), and one other Best Picture nominee: Horizontes perdidos (1937).

A close friend of John Huston's; they first knew each other when Huston was a teenager living in the same building as Jaffe in New York. When the young Huston half-jokingly mentioned that he would like a horse for his 18th birthday, Jaffe somehow got hold of a horse ("the oldest, most broken-down horse you ever saw", according to Huston) and pushed it all the way up several flights of stairs until it was outside Huston's room. The future director never forgot this, or how amused he had been - the story was told by Jaffe when Huston won the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award nearly sixty years later.

He was a lifelong liberal Democrat.