Stella Adler

She was on a stage at four, in a play called Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre on the Lower East Side, and the company belonged to her parents. Her father, Jacob P. Adler, was the reigning tragedian of the Yiddish theatre, a star of a kind the English-language stage had no equivalent for, and all five of her siblings acted too. Touring left little room for school. She made her London debut at 18, her English-language Broadway debut in 1922, and spent a season in vaudeville. When she joined the Group Theatre in 1931 she had been a working actress for 26 years and had never taught anyone anything.

In 1934 she went to Paris with Harold Clurman and spent five weeks working directly with Konstantin Stanislavski, the only member of the Group Theatre ever to do so. She came home and told the company that Strasberg had it wrong. Strasberg drilled actors in affective memory — reach back into your own griefs, find the one that matches the scene, and let it produce the feeling onstage. Stanislavski had abandoned that. What he wanted now was the given circumstances of the play itself, studied and imagined until an actor could think from inside them.

The break was permanent, and it split American acting in two. She took the argument into her own classroom, where the students came to include Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen and Warren Beatty. Brando, whom the public filed under the Method for 50 years, credited her instead and said so for the rest of his life — all of film acting, he wrote, stems from Stella Adler, and she had never lent herself to the vulgar exploitations of the so-called methods. Her objection was not only aesthetic. She believed the other technique damaged the people who practiced it. Drawing on the death of her own mother to build a role, she said, was sick and schizophrenic, and if that was acting she did not want to do it.

She founded her studio in New York in 1949 and ran it for the rest of her life, teaching also at the New School, at Yale, and for years at the head of the undergraduate drama department at New York University. The instruction was not therapeutic. She sent actors to read history, look at paintings, and learn what people in other centuries believed and what riding a horse actually demanded, on the ground that imagination is useless without material. An actor who skipped that work, she said, walked onto the stage naked. The Technique of Acting appeared in 1988 with a foreword by Brando. She died of heart failure in Los Angeles on December 21, 1992, at 91.

Stella Adler's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Stella Adler Studio of Acting other
  Founded in New York and still teaching her technique 1949
• Johnny Johnson (revival) other
  She directed the Paul Green and Kurt Weill antiwar musical 1956
• The Technique of Acting book
  Her method in print, with a foreword by Marlon Brando 1988
• Stella Adler: The Art of Acting book
  Her classes reconstructed by Howard Kissel after her death 2000
• Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov book
  Script analysis as she taught it, edited by Barry Paris 2001

• 1905 aged ~4 Makes her stage debut at four in Broken Hearts At the Grand Street Theatre, with her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company.
• 1922 aged ~21 Makes her English-language Broadway debut in The World We Live In She played the Butterfly, then spent a season in vaudeville.
• 1925 aged ~24 Joins the American Laboratory Theatre Her first exposure to Stanislavski, secondhand, through Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya.
• 1931 aged ~30 Joins the Group Theatre Founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford.
• 1934 aged ~33 Studies with Stanislavski in Paris for five weeks She learned he had abandoned emotional memory in favor of imagination and the given circumstances.
• January 1937 aged 35 Moves to Hollywood and acts in films under the name Stella Ardler She appeared in only three pictures in six years.
• 1949 aged ~48 Founds her own acting studio in New York
• 1991 aged ~90 Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame
• December 21, 1992 aged 91 Dies of heart failure in Los Angeles at 91

• Lee Strasberg 1901–1982
  Taught the Method to two generations of American actors, and made affective memory the centre of it. opposed
• Marlon Brando 1924–2004
  Actor whose method acting revolutionized film performance and influenced generations of actors. taught
• Robert De Niro b. 1943
  Academy Award-winning actor whose method performances in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull defined a generation. taught
• Harold Clurman 1901–1980
  Co-founder of the Group Theatre and drama critic of The Nation married to
• Sanford Meisner 1905–1997
  Acting teacher who created the Meisner technique Group Theatre colleague
• Elia Kazan 1909–2003
  Directed A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and On the Waterfront, and named names to HUAC. Group Theatre colleague