page_title: Stella Adler
section_title: Stanislavski and the method
hierarchical_section_title: Stella Adler / Stanislavski and the method
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo of Luther and Stella Adler for their appearance in the play Awake and Sing!.
context_page_description: Stella Adler was an American actress and acting teacher. She founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949. Later in life she taught part time in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her protégée, actress Joanne Linville, who continues to teach Adler's technique. Her grandson Tom Oppenheim now runs the school in New York City, which has produced alumni such as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Elaine Stritch, Kate Mulgrew, Kipp Hamilton, and Jenny Lumet.
  Irene Gilbert, a longtime protégée and friend, ran the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in Los Angeles, until her death. The Los Angeles school continues to function as an acting studio and houses several theaters. Alumni of the Stella Adler-Los Angeles school include Mark Ruffalo, Benicio del Toro, Brion James, Salma Hayek, Clifton Collins Jr., and Sean Astin.
context_section_description: Adler was the only member of the Group Theatre to study with Konstantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre, but differences with Lee Strasberg over the Stanislavski's system (later developed by Strasberg into method acting) made her leave the group. She 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 that they both believed that actors did not have what is required to play a variety of 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.
  Like Stanislavski, Adler understood the "gold hidden" inside the circumstances of the text. Actors should stimulate emotional experience by imagining the scene's "given circumstances," rather than recalling experiences from their own lives. She also understood that 50% of the actors job is internal (imagination, emotion, action, will) and 50% is externals (characterization, way of walking, voice, fencing, sports). To find what works for the character, the actors must study the circumstances of the text and make their choices based on what one gets from the material.
  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, when those situations might mean nothing in the actor's own culture. Without this work, Adler said that an actor walks onto the stage "naked". This approach is one for which both Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro became famous.
  Adler also trained actors' sensory imagination to help make the characters' experiences more vivid. She believed that mastery of the physical and vocal aspects of acting was necessary for the actor to command the stage, and that 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", and she encouraged actors to find the most grand character interpretation possible in a scene; another favorite phrase of hers regarding this was "don't be boring".
  Singer-songwriter Janis Ian studied under Adler in the early 1980s to help her feel more comfortable on stage, and the two women remained close friends until Adler's death.  In her autobiography Society's Child (2008), Ian recalled that Adler had little patience for students who weren't progressing as she wanted, going so far on one occasion as to give one of her students a dime and tell her to call her mother to pick her up because "she had no business in the theater." On another occasion, Ian relates, Adler forcibly ripped a dress off another actress's body to get the actress to play a scene a different way.
  Devo Cutler-Rubenstein credits Adler for inspiring her that a character is made real through one's imagination.  She cites a story when she studied with Adler, who slowly peeled her bra off under her clothes, while lecturing about Tennessee Williams in Los Angeles, "You listened to me, didn't you, because you were fascinated with what I was doing with my bra?" Devo says Adler insisted on the truth living in our imagination and that it was an "unending pool of information and research to be accessed."
caption: Luther and Stella Adler, 1936
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