Career
She began her acting career at the age of four in the play Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre on the Lower East Side, as a part of her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company. She grew up acting alongside her parents, often playing roles of boys and girls. Her work schedule allowed little time for schooling, but when possible, she studied at public schools and New York University. She made her London debut, at the age of 18, as Naomi in the play Elisa Ben Avia with her father's company, in which she appeared for a year before returning to New York. In London she met her first husband, Englishman Horace Eliashcheff; their brief marriage however ended in a divorce.
She made her English-language debut on Broadway in 1922, as the Butterfly in the play The World We Live In, and also spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922–1923, the renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only US tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler and many others saw these performances; this had a powerful and lasting impact on her career, as well as the 20th-century American theatre. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925; there she was introduced to Stanislavski's theories, from founders and Russian actor-teachers and former members of the Moscow Art Theater—Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1931 she joined the Group Theatre, New York, founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, through theater director and critic, Clurman, whom she later married in 1943. With Group theatre she worked in plays like Success Story by John Howard Lawson, two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, and directed the touring company of Odets's Golden Boy and More to Give to People. Members of Group Theatre were leading interpreters of the Method acting technique based on the work and writings of Stanislavski.
In 1934, Adler went to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. During this period, she learned that Stanislavski had revised his theories, emphasizing that the actor should create by imagination rather than memory. Upon her return, she broke away from Strasberg on the fundamental aspects of Method acting.
In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood. There she acted in films for six years under the name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theater until it dissolved in 1941. Eventually she returned to New York to act, direct and teach, the latter first at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, New York City, before founding Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1949. In the coming years, she taught Marlon Brando, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolores del Río, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Manu Tupou, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich and Warren Beatty, among others, the principles of characterization and script analysis. She also taught at the New School, and the Yale School of Drama. For many years, Adler led the undergraduate drama department at New York University, and became one of America's leading acting teachers.
Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information—how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As a result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated.
—Marlon Brando
Adler was Marlon Brando's first professional acting teacher.
In 1988, she published 'The Technique of Acting' (Bantam Books), with a foreword by Brando.
From 1926 until 1952, Adler appeared regularly on Broadway. Her later stage roles include the 1946 revival of 'He Who Gets Slapped' and an eccentric mother in the 1961 black comedy, 'Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad.' Among the plays she directed was a 1956 revival of the Paul Green-Kurt Weill antiwar musical 'Johnny Johnson'. Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career, by Edward Vilga. She appeared in only three films, Love on Toast (1937), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), and My Girl Tisa (1948).
Stanislavski and The Method
Adler was the only American actor to study with Constantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre but differences with Lee Strasberg over the Stanislavski System (later developed by Strasberg into Method acting) made her leave the Group.
Adler once said: "Drawing on the emotions I experienced—for example, when my mother died—to create a role, is sick and schizophrenic. If that is acting, I don't want to do it."
Adler met with Stanislavski again later in his career and questioned him on Strasberg's interpretation. He told her that he had abandoned emotional memory (which had been Strasberg's dominant paradigm), but they both believed that the actor did not have what is required to play a variety roles already instilled inside them and that extensive research was needed to understand the experiences of characters who have different values originating from different cultures. For instance, if a character talks about horse riding, one needs to know something about horse riding as an actor, otherwise one will be faking. More importantly one must study the values of different people to understand what situations would have meant to people, that in the actor's own culture might mean nothing. Without this work she said an actor walks onto the stage "naked." This approach is one for which one of her students, Robert De Niro, became famous. She also trained actors sensory imagination to help make the characters' experiences more vivid (a commonality between her and Strasberg). Mastery of the physical and vocal aspects of acting, she believed, was necessary for the actor to command the stage: all body language should be carefully crafted and voices need to be clear and expressive. She often referred to this as an actor's "size" or "worthiness of the stage." Her biggest mantra was perhaps, "in your choices lies your talent," she would encourage actors to find the most grand character interpretation possible in a scene, another favorite phrase of hers regarding this was "don't be boring."
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Adler"
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