Stella Adler

• Born: February 1, 1901
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 21, 1992
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Actor and teacher

In a legendary acting career that spanned fifty years, Adler, in addition to her exemplary work on stage and in film, exerted profound influence on the shape and direction of contemporary American acting through her work for more than three decades as one of New York’s most respected and controversial acting teachers.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

Stella Adler (STEH-lah AD-lur) was born to the theater. She was the youngest daughter of Sara and Jacob P. Adler, both legends in New York’s storied late nineteenth century Yiddish theater (eventually five of her siblings would work in the theater). Adler appeared on the stage by the age of four and spent most of her adolescence performing progressively more demanding roles, most of them in Yiddish; she had more than one hundred different roles before she was eighteen. Because she had time for little else, the theater became a refuge, a source of potent imaginative energy, and a place of extravagant freedom. She attended public school irregularly, given her time-consuming commitment to the theater. Nevertheless, she loved learning and maintained good grades through diligent independent study (she would complete high school and graduate from New York University). At eighteen, she made her debut in London with her father’s touring company, and two years later she made her first English-language Broadway appearance.

Her career launched, Adler was restless with the acting methods of her colleagues. To her, their actions on the stage seemed contrived and forced, too geared toward soliciting audience reaction, too exaggerated, too absorbed with makeup and costuming, and too little involved in the emotionally demanding work of creating a convincing psychology for a character. To Adler, the acting was soulless. When the renowned Russian theater icon Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater toured New York and lectured eager young actors (among them Adler) on his theories of how the best actors methodically invested the performance of a character with emotions that drew from their own experiences, Adler enthusiastically embraced his philosophy. He provided a way to give two-dimensional scripted characters the necessary depth to come across as authentic. Adler joined the experimental Laboratory Theatre School in 1925, a small avant-garde acting company shaped by Stanislavsky’s theory of method acting.

Life’s Work

In 1931, Adler was invited to help start a new theater company. Along with director Harold Clurman, veteran stage actorLee Strasberg, and producer Cheryl Crawford, Adler founded the Group Theater, a tightly knit company of twenty-eight actors dedicated to redefining American theater, bringing to the New York stage new plays and gritty and realistic productions (as opposed to the frothy entertainments and melodramas of the day) with powerful contemporary social and political messages. Over the next decade, the theater ensemble staged twenty-six productions to tremendous critical praise. Adler’s most memorable success came as the heroic beleaguered mother in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! (1935), centered on the tribulations of an impoverished Bronx family struggling to hold on to hope for their future.

The direction of the theater group was increasingly guided by the vision of Strasberg, who considerably expanded Stanislavsky’s theory and who demanded that the young actors draw from their most potent (and often painful) personal experiences to generate stage emotions or recall specific sensory experiences to create verisimilitude with their characters. Adler became uncomfortable with the premise. She argued that actors should explore the text, think through the character, rather than their own emotional life, and invest the play with their imaginative energy. The turning point came in 1934 when, on a trip to Paris (she took a leave of absence from the theater company), Adler met Stanislavsky and worked under him for more than a month. In that time, they had lengthy conversations about method acting. Adler was encouraged to find that the great man had altered considerably his theoretical approach and agreed with Adler that the actor’s imagination and creativity, rather than the actor’s memory, should inform a character.

When Adler returned to New York, she attempted unsuccessfully to sway Strasberg to moderate his method acting program. In 1937, unable to tolerate what she conceived to be monstrous misdirection—acting based on the vulgar exploitation of an actor’s emotional traumas—she left New York for Hollywood. She enjoyed moderate success in a string of B-films (most under the name Stella Ardler). When she returned to Broadway after the war, she found few strong parts for an actor approaching fifty. However, she took several turns as a director, notably for a 1952 revival of Odets’s Golden Boy (1937). It was then she discovered what would become her passion, teaching acting, initially at New York University’s New School for Social Research and in 1949 in her own school for acting, the Stella Adler Conservatory for Acting (later the Stella Adler Studio of Acting).

Over the next three decades, Adler maintained her commitment to teaching, not only at her own studio but also at Yale University. Her classes became legendary. Under her direction, her studio steadily expanded. Once she retired from performing in 1961, she devoted her considerable energies to her teaching and to publishing her theories on acting in a series of well-received (and successful) books. She reluctantly stopped teaching in her eighties. When she died of heart failure at the age of ninety-one in 1992, she was hailed as the most influential force in twentieth century American dramatic theater.

Significance

In bringing together Stanislavsky’s acting theory, which positioned the actor (rather than the playwright or the director) as the central energy in the theater, and her long background in Yiddish theater (with its emphasis on ensemble acting, sympathetic characters, and enthralling story lines), Adler gave a new direction to postwar American acting. Actors would draw the richness of their characters from the careful analysis of the play itself, using the resources of their imagination and the dynamic of fellow actors to essentially create that character in ways that neither the director nor the playwright may have conceived. Adler believed theater to be a community effort, a cooperative of talent that embraced the creative integrity of the actor’s input.

Bibliography

Adler, Stella. Stella Adler: The Art of Acting. New York: Applause, 2000. Fascinating collection of Adler’s most controversial theories on developing character through imaginative engagement with the script. Caustic review of what she argued was the misinterpretation of Stanislavsky that led to her departure from the Group Theater.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Technique of Acting. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Essential reading. Transcripts of Adler’s studio workshops with copious illustrations. Introduction stresses the impressive range of Adler’s influence in both serious theater and film.

Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1983. Still considered the best account of the experimental theater company where Adler started. Written by legendary Broadway director and longtime theater critic (and Adler’s second husband). Explains the rift between Adler and Strasberg.

Rotte, Joanna. Acting with Adler. New York: Limelight, 2001. Helpful recounting of Adler’s evolution as the dominant presence in American stage acting. Important perspective provides a sense of the impact of Adler’s theories on successive generations of American actors.