From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lee Strasberg
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Strasberg in 1976
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| Born |
Israel Strassberg
November 17, 1901
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| Died | February 17, 1982 (aged 80)
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| Occupation |
- actor
- director
- drama teacher
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| Years active | 1925–1981 |
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| Known for | Teaching method acting |
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| Spouse(s) |
Nora Krecaum ( m. ; died 1929)
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| Children | 4, including Susan and John Strasberg |
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Lee Strasberg (born
Israel Lee Strassberg; November 17, 1901 – February 17, 1982) was a
Polish-born American actor, director, and
theatre practitioner. He co-founded, with directors
Harold Clurman and
Cheryl Crawford, the
Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective". In 1951 he became director of the nonprofit
Actors Studio in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school," and in 1966 he was involved in the creation of Actors Studio West in Los Angeles.
Although other highly regarded teachers also developed "the Method", Strasberg is often considered the "father of
method acting in America", according to author
Mel Gussow,
and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 "he revolutionized the art
of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American
theater and film." From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film notables, including
Anne Bancroft,
Dustin Hoffman,
Montgomery Clift,
James Dean,
Marilyn Monroe,
Jane Fonda,
Julie Harris,
Paul Newman,
Ellen Burstyn,
Al Pacino,
Robert De Niro,
Geraldine Page,
Eli Wallach, and directors
Frank Perry and
Elia Kazan.
By 1970, Strasberg had become less involved with the Actors Studio and, with his third wife, Anna, opened the
Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute with branches in New York City and in
Hollywood, to continue teaching the
'system' of
Konstantin Stanislavski, which he had interpreted and developed, particularly in light of the ideas of
Yevgeny Vakhtangov, for contemporary actors. The institute's primary stated goal was "to reach a larger audience of eager and emerging talent" than was served by the Actors Studio's notoriously selective admission process,
and as teachers of the method began to deploy their own personal
interpretations of the discipline, "to dispel growing confusion and
misrepresentation of the method, preserving what had by now become
fundamental discoveries in
actor training."
The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute has its own rigorous sets
of entrance criteria required for admission into their program.
Former student Elia Kazan directed James Dean in
East of Eden (1955), for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for
Academy Awards.
As a student, Dean wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest school of
the theater [and] the best thing that can happen to an actor." Playwright
Tennessee Williams, writer of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
said of Strasberg's actors, "They act from the inside out. They
communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life."
Directors such as
Sidney Lumet, a former student, have intentionally used actors skilled in Strasberg's "method".
Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a
witch doctor, a
psychoanalyst,
and a feared father of a Jewish home ... [He] was the force that held
the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them
'permanent'."
Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit
studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and
directors.
As an actor, Strasberg is probably best known for his supporting role as gangster
Hyman Roth alongside his former student Pacino in
The Godfather Part II (1974), a role he took at Pacino's suggestion after Kazan turned down the role, and which earned him a nomination for the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also appeared in
Going in Style (1979) and
... And Justice for All (1979).
Strasberg's personal papers, including photos, are archived at the
Library of Congress.
Early years
Lee Strasberg was born Israel Strassberg in
Budzanów in
Austrian Poland (part of
Austria-Hungary, now in
Ukraine), to Jewish parents,
Baruch Meyer Strassberg and his wife, Ida (born Chaia), née Diner, and
was the youngest of three sons. His father emigrated to New York while
his family remained in their home village with an uncle, a rabbinical
teacher. His father, who worked as a presser in the garment industry,
sent first for his eldest son and his daughter. Finally, enough money
was saved to bring over his wife and his two remaining sons. In 1909 the
family was reunited on
Manhattan's
Lower East Side, where they lived until the early 1920s. Young
Strasberg took refuge in voracious reading and the companionship of his
older brother, Zalmon, whose death in the
1918 influenza pandemic was so
traumatic for the young Strasberg that, despite being a straight-A student, he dropped out of high school.
A relative introduced him to the theatre by giving him a small part in a
Yiddish-language
production being performed by the Progressive Drama Club. He later
joined the Chrystie Street Settlement House's drama club.
Philip Loeb,
casting director of the Theater Guild, sensed that Strasberg could act,
although he was not yet thinking of a full-time acting career, and was
still working as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper for a wig company. When
he was 23 years old, he enrolled in the
Clare Tree Major
School of the Theater. He became a naturalized United States citizen on
January 16, 1939, in New York City at the New York Southern District
Court.
Encounter with Stanislavski
Kazan biographer
Richard Schickel described Strasberg's first experiences with the art of acting:
He dropped
out of high school, worked in a shop that made hairpieces, drifted into
the theater via a settlement house company and ... had his life-shaping
revelation when Stanislavski brought his Moscow Art Theatre
to the United States in 1923. He had seen good acting before, of
course, but never an ensemble like this with actors completely
surrendering their egos to the work. ... [H]e observed, first of all,
that all the actors, whether they were playing leads or small parts,
worked with the same commitment and intensity. No actors idled about
posing and preening (or thinking about where they might dine after the
performance). More important, every actor seemed to project some sort of
unspoken, yet palpable, inner life for his or her character. This was
acting of a sort that one rarely saw on the American stage ... where
there was little stress on the psychology of the characters or their
interactions. ... Strasberg was galvanized. He knew that his own future
as an actor — he was a slight and unhandsome man — was limited. But he
soon perceived that as a theoretician and teacher of this new 'system'
it might become a major force in American theater.
According to Schickel:
What
Strasberg ... took away from the Actors Lab was a belief that just as an
actor could be prepared physically for his work with dance, movement,
and fencing
classes, he could be mentally prepared by resort to analogous mental
exercises. They worked on relaxation as well as concentration. They
worked with nonexistent objects that helped prepare them for the
exploration of equally ephemeral emotions. They learned to use
"affective memory," as Strasberg called the most controversial aspect of
his teaching — summoning emotions from their own lives to illuminate
their stage roles. ... Strasberg believed he could codify this system, a
necessary precursor to teaching it to anyone who wanted to learn it.
... [H]e became a director more preoccupied with getting his actors to
work in the "correct" way than he was in shaping the overall
presentation.
Acting director and teacher
Group Theater
He gained a reputation with the Theater Guild of New York and helped form the Group Theater in New York in 1931. There, he created a technique that became known as "the method" or "
method acting". His teaching style owed much to the Russian
practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavski, whose book,
An Actor Prepares (published in English in 1936), dealt with the
psychology of acting. He began by directing, but his time was gradually taken up by the
training of actors.
Called "America's first true theatrical collective," the Group Theater
immediately offered a few tuition-free scholarships for its three-year
program to "promising students."
Publishers Weekly
wrote, "The Group Theatre ... with its self-defined mission to
reconnect theater to the world of ideas and actions, staged plays that
confronted social and moral issues ... with members
Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella, and Luther Adler,
Clifford Odets,
Elia Kazan, and an ill-assorted band of idealistic actors living hand
to mouth are seen welded in a collective of creativity that was also a
tangle of jealousies, love affairs, and explosive feuds." Playwright
Arthur Miller
said "the Group Theatre was unique and probably will never be repeated.
For a while it was literally the voice of Depression America."
Co-founder Harold Clurman, in describing what Strasberg brought to the
Group Theater, wrote:
Lee
Strasberg is one of the few artists among American theater directors. He
is the director of introverted feeling, of strong emotion curbed by
ascetic control, sentiment of great intensity muted by delicacy, pride,
fear, shame. The effect he produces is a classic hush, tense and tragic,
a constant conflict so held in check that a kind of beautiful spareness
results. The roots are clearly in the intimate experience of a complex
psychology, an acute awareness of human contradiction and suffering.
Strasberg, Kazan, Clurman, and others with the Group Theater spent the summer of 1936 at
Pine Brook Country Club, located in the countryside of
Nichols, Connecticut. They spent previous summers at various places in upstate New York and near Danbury, Connecticut.
Amid internecine tensions, Strasberg resigned as a director of the Group Theatre in March 1937.
Actors Studio
In 1947 Elia Kazan,
Robert Lewis,
and Cheryl Crawford, also members of the Group Theatre, started the
Actors Studio as a nonprofit workshop for professional and aspiring
actors to concentrate on their craft away from the pressures of the
commercial theatre.
Strasberg assumed leadership of the studio in 1951 as its artistic
director. "As a teacher and acting theorist, he revolutionized American
actor training and engaged such remarkable performers as
Kim Hunter,
Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ellen
Burstyn, and Al Pacino." Since its inception, the studio has been a
nonprofit educational corporation chartered by the state of New York,
and has been supported entirely by contributions and benefits. ... We
have here the possibility of creating a kind of theatre that would be a
shining medal for our country," Strasberg said in 1959. UCLA acting
teacher Robert Hethmon writes, "The Actors Studio is a refuge. Its
privacy is guarded ferociously against the casual intruder, the seeker
of curiousities, and the exploiter. ... The Studio helps actors to meet
the enemy within ... and contributes greatly to Strasberg's utterly
pragmatic views on training the actor and solving his problems.
... [and] is kept deliberately modest in its circumstances, its essence
being the private room where Lee Strasberg and some talented actors can
work."
Strasberg wrote: "At the studio, we do not sit around and feed
each other's egos. People are shocked how severe we are on each other."
Admission to the Actors Studio was usually by audition with more than a
thousand actors auditioning each year and the directors usually
conferring membership on only five or six each year. "The Studio was,
and is
sui generis,"
said Elia Kazan, proudly. Beginning in a small, private way, with a
strictly off-limits-to-outsiders policy, the Studio quickly earned a
high reputation in theatre circles. "It became the place to be, the
forum where all the most promising and unconventional young actors were
being cultivated by sharp young directors." Actors who have worked at the studio include Julie Harris, Paul Newman,
Joanne Woodward, Geraldine Page,
Maureen Stapleton, Anne Bancroft,
Dustin Hoffman,
Patricia Neal,
Rod Steiger,
Mildred Dunnock,
Eva Marie Saint, Eli Wallach,
Anne Jackson,
Ben Gazzara,
Sidney Poitier,
Karl Malden,
Gene Wilder,
Shelley Winters,
Dennis Hopper, and
Sally Field.
The Emmy Award-winning author of
Inside Inside,
James Lipton,
writes that the Actors Studio became "one of the most prestigious
institutions in the world" as a result of its desire to set a higher
"standard" in acting. The founders, including Strasberg, demanded total commitment and extreme talent from aspiring students.
Jack Nicholson
auditioned five times before he was accepted; Dustin Hoffman, six
times; and Harvey Keitel, 11 times. After each rejection, a candidate
had to wait as long as a year to try again.
Martin Landau and
Steve McQueen were the only two students admitted one year, out of 2000 candidates who auditioned.
- Al Pacino: "The Actors Studio meant so much to me in my
life. Lee Strasberg hasn't been given the credit he deserves. Brando
doesn't give Lee any credit ... Next to Charlie Laughton (an acting
teacher at HB Studio, and not to be confused with English actor Charles Laughton),
it sort of launched me. It really did. That was a remarkable turning
point in my life. It was directly responsible for getting me to quit all
those jobs and just stay acting."
- Marlon Brando: Movie stars spawned by Strasberg's Actors
Studio were of a new type that is often labeled the "rebel hero," wrote
Pamela Wojcik. Historian Sam Staggs writes that "Marlon Brando was the hot, sleek engine on the Actors Studio express," and called him "[the] embodiment of method acting," but Brando was trained primarily by Stella Adler,
a former member of the Group Theatre, who had a falling out with
Strasberg over his interpretations of Stanislavsky's ideas." He based
his acting technique on the method, once stating, "It made me a real
actor. The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your
life and you learn to use it in creating the character you're working
on. You learn how to dig into your unconscious and make use of every
experience you've ever had."
In Brando's autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, the
actor claimed he learned nothing from Strasberg: "After I had some
success, Lee Strasberg tried to take credit for teaching me how to act.
He never taught me anything. He would have claimed credit for the sun
and the moon if he believed he could get away with it. He tried to
project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him,
and I never knew why. I sometimes went to the Actors Studio on Saturday
mornings because Elia Kazan was teaching, and there were usually a lot
of good-looking girls there, but Strasberg never taught me acting.
Stella did — and later Kazan."
- James Dean: According to James Dean biographer W. Bast,
"Proud of this accomplishment, Dean referred to the studio in a 1952
letter, when he was 21 years old, to his family as 'The greatest school
of the theater. It houses great people like Marlon Brando, Julie Harris,
Arthur Kennedy, Mildred Dunnock. ... Very few get into it. ... It's the
best thing that can happen to an actor. I'm one of the youngest to
belong.'"
- Marilyn Monroe: Film author Maurice Zolotow wrote: "Between The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot
only four years elapsed, but her world had changed. She had become one
of the most celebrated personalities in the world. She had divorced Joe DiMaggio. She had married Arthur Miller. She had become a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She was seriously studying acting. She was reading good books."
- Tennessee Williams: Tennessee Williams'
plays have been populated by graduates of the studio, where he felt,
"studio actors had a more intense and honest style of acting." He wrote,
"They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really
feel. They give you a sense of life." Williams was a co-founder of the group and a key member of its playwright's wing; he later wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando's greatest early role.
- Jane Fonda: Jane Fonda recalled that at the age of 5, her brother, actor Peter Fonda, and she acted out Western stories similar to those her father, Henry Fonda,
played in the movies. She attended Vassar College and went to Paris for
two years to study art. Upon returning, she met Lee Strasberg and the
meeting changed the course of her life, Fonda saying, "I went to the
Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It
was the first time that anyone, except my father — who had to say so —
told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I
went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It
was like the roof had come off my life!"
Teaching methods and philosophy
In
describing his teaching philosophy, Strasberg wrote, "The two areas of
discovery that were of primary importance in my work at the Actors
Studio and in my private classes were improvisation and affective
memory. It is finally by using these techniques that the actor can
express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character."
Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors, as well as great
depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his approach in
this way:
The human
being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying
circumstance. Essentially, the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life,
the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must
constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must
happen not only just as it happens in life, but [also] actually more
fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life
quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under
fictitious conditions, he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a
human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow
believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of
what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage.
According to film critic/author
Mel Gussow,
Strasberg required that an actor, when preparing for a role, delve not
only into the character's life in the play but also, "Far more
importantly, into the character's life before the curtain rises. In
rehearsal, the character's prehistory, perhaps going back to childhood,
is discussed and even acted out. The play became the climax of the
character's existence."
Elia Kazan as student
In Elia Kazan's autobiography, the
Academy Award–winning director wrote about his earliest memories of Strasberg as teacher:
He carried
with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a
psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. He was the center
of the camp's activities that summer, the core of the vortex. Everything
in camp revolved around him. Preparing to direct the play that was to
open the coming season, as he had the three plays of the season before,
he would also give the basic instruction in acting, laying down the
principles of the art by which the Group worked, the guides to their
artistic training. He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of
the theatre together, made them 'permanent.' He did this not only by his
superior knowledge but by the threat of his anger. ... He enjoyed his
eminence just as the admiral would. Actors are as self-favoring as the
rest of humanity, and perhaps the only way they could be held together
to do their work properly was by the threat of an authority they
respected. And feared. No one questioned his dominance — he spoke holy
writ — his leading role in that summer's activities, and his right to
all power. To win his favor became everyone's goal. His explosions of
temper maintained the discipline of this camp of high-strung people. I
came to believe that without their fear of this man, the Group would fly
apart, everyone going in different directions instead of to where he
was pointing. ... I was afraid of him too. Even as I admired him. Lee
was making an artistic revolution and knew it. An organization such as
the Group – then in its second year, which is to say still beginning,
still being shaped — lives only by the will of a fanatic and the drive
with which he propels his vision. He has to be unswerving,
uncompromising, and unadjustable. Lee knew this. He'd studied other
revolutions, political and artistic. He knew what was needed, and he was
fired up by his mission and its importance.
Classroom settings
Kazan described the classes taught by Strasberg:
At his
classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised
the first exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor's
arousing his inner temperament. The essential and rather simple
technique, which has since then been complicated by teachers of acting
who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial
advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and
personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor's
past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have
heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our
surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling
ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware
that he has emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this
self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that
these emotions are the materials of his art. ... Lee taught his actors
to launch their work on every scene by taking a minute to remember the
details surrounding the emotional experience in their lives that would
correspond to the emotion of the scene they were about to play. 'Take a
minute!' became the watchword of that summer, the phrase heard most
often, just as this particular kind of inner concentration became the
trademark of Lee's own work when he directed a production. His actors
often appeared to be in a state of self-hypnosis.
James Dean
James Dean in East of Eden
In 1955 Strasberg student James Dean died in a car accident, at age
24. Strasberg, during a regular lecture shortly after this accident,
discussed Dean. The following are excerpts from a transcription of his
recorded lecture:
(In the
middle of his lecture on another topic) To hell with it! I hadn't
planned to say this, because I don't know how I'll behave when I say it;
I don't think it will bother me. But I saw Jimmy Dean in Giant
the other night, and I must say that — [he weeps] You see, that's what I
was afraid of. [A long pause] When I got in the cab, I cried. ... What I
cried at was the waste, the waste. ... If there is anything in the
theatre to which I respond more than anything else — maybe I'm getting
old, or maybe I'm getting sentimental — it is the waste in the theatre,
the talent that gets up and the work that goes into getting it up and
getting it where it should be. And then when it gets there, what the
hell happens with it? The senseless destruction, the senseless waste,
the hopping about from one thing to the next, the waste of the talent,
the waste of your lives, the strange kind of behavior that not just
Jimmy had, you see, but that a lot of you here have and a lot of other
actors have that are going through exactly the same thing. ... As soon
as you grow up as actors, as soon as you reach a certain place, there it
goes, the drunkenness and the rest of it, as if, now that you've really
made it, the incentive goes, and something happens which to me is just
terrifying. I don't know what to do. ...
The only answer possibly is that we somehow here find a way, a means, an
organization, a plan [that] should really contribute to the theatre, so
that there should not only be the constant stimulus to your individual
development, which I think we have provided, but also that once your
individual development is established, it should then actually
contribute to the theatre, rather than to an accidental succession of
good, bad, or indifferent things. But I am very, very scared that
despite how strongly I feel, or despite how stimulated you become,
nothing will be done. ... [A]nd we will just continue to get so caught
up that in a strange way we do not really live our lives. ... To me that
is the future of the Studio, that a unified body of people should
somehow be connected with a tangible, consistent, and continuous effort.
That is the dream I have always had. That is what got me into theatre
in the first place. That was the thing that got me involved in The
Actors Studio ... and now it becomes time to think a little bit more
about our responsibility for that individual talent. ... I'm stuck. I
don't know. And this is really the problem of the Studio.
On Marilyn Monroe
In
1962 Marilyn Monroe died at age 36. At the time of her death, she was
at the height of her career. In 1999 she was ranked the sixth-greatest
female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the
American Film Institute. Strasberg gave the eulogy at her funeral.
For us,
Marilyn was a devoted and loyal friend — a colleague constantly reaching
for perfection. We shared her pain and difficulties, and some of her
joys. She was a member of our family. ... It is difficult to accept the
fact that her zest for life has been ended by this dreadful accident.
Despite the heights and brilliance she had attained on the screen, she
was planning for the future. She was looking forward to participating in
the many exciting things. In her eyes, and in mine, her career was just
beginning. ... She had a luminous quality. A combination of
wistfulness, radiance, and yearning that set her apart and made everyone
wish to be part of it — to share in the childish naiveté which was at
once so shy and yet so vibrant.
Personal life
His
first marriage was to Nora Krecaum on October 29, 1926, until her death
three years later in 1929. In 1934 he married actress and drama coach
Paula Miller (1909–1966) until her death from cancer in 1966. They were the parents of actress
Susan Strasberg (1938–1999) and acting teacher
John Strasberg
(born 1941). His third wife was the former Anna Mizrahi (b. April 16,
1939) and the mother of his two youngest children, Adam Lee Strasberg
(b. July 29, 1969) and David Lee Israel Strasberg (b. January 30, 1971).
Death and commemoration
On February 17, 1982, Lee Strasberg suffered a fatal
heart attack in New York City, aged 80. With him at the time of his death at the hospital were his third wife, Anna, and their two sons. He was interred at
Westchester Hills Cemetery in
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. A day before his unexpected death, he was officially notified that he had been elected to the
American Theater Hall of Fame. His last public appearance was on February 14, 1982, at
Night of 100 Stars in the
Radio City Music Hall, a benefit for the
Actors Fund of America. Along with Al Pacino and
Robert De Niro, he danced in the chorus line with
The Rockettes.
Actress Ellen Burstyn recalled that evening:
Late in the
evening, I wandered into the greenroom and saw Lee sitting next to Anna,
watching the taping on the monitor. I sat next to him and we chatted a
little. Lee wasn't one for small talk, so I didn't stay long. But before
I got up, I said, 'Lee, I've been asked to run for president of Actors
Equity.' He reached over and patted me on the back, 'That's wonderful,
dahling. Congratulations.' Those were the last words he ever said to me.
... Two days later, early in the morning, I was still asleep when the
door to my bedroom opened. I woke up and saw my friend and assistant,
Katherine Cortez, enter the room and walk toward me. ... 'We just got a
call. Lee Strasberg died.' No, no, no, I wailed, over and over. 'I'm not
ready,' and pulled the covers over my head. I had told myself that I
must be prepared for this, but I was not prepared. What was I to do now?
Who would I work for when I was preparing for a role? Who would I go to
when I was in trouble?. ... His memorial service was held at the Shubert Theater where A Chorus Line
was playing. Lee's coffin was brought down the aisle and placed center
stage. Everybody in the theater world came — actors, writers, directors,
producers, and most, if not all of, his students. He was a giant of the
theater and was deeply mourned. Those of us who had the great good
fortune to be fertilized and quickened by his genius would feel the loss
of him for the rest of our lives.
In an 80th birthday interview, he said that he was looking forward to
his next 20 years in the theater. According to friends, he was healthy
until the day he died. "It was so unexpected," Al Pacino said. "What
stood out was how youthful he was. He never seemed as old as his years.
He was an inspiration." Actress Jane Fonda said after hearing of his
death, "I'm not sure I even would have become an actress were it not for
him. He will be missed, but he leaves behind a great legacy."
Legacy
"Whether
directly influenced by Strasberg or not," wrote acting author Pamela
Wojcik, "the new male stars all to some degree or other adapted method
techniques to support their identification as rebels. ... He recreates
romance as a drama of male neuroticism and also invests his
characterization 'with an unprecedented aura of verisimilitude.'"
Acting teacher and author Alison Hodge explains: "Seemingly
spontaneous, intuitive, brooding, 'private,' lit with potent vibrations
from an inner life of conflict and contradiction, their work exemplified
the style of heightened naturalism which (whether Brando agrees or not)
Lee Strasberg devoted his life to exploring and promoting." Pamela Wojcik adds:
Because
of their tendency to substitute their personal feelings for those of the
characters they were playing, Actors Studio performers were well suited
to become Hollywood stars. ... In short, Lee Strasberg transformed a
socialistic, egalitarian theory of acting into a celebrity-making
machine. ... It does not matter who 'invented' Marlon Brando or how
regularly or faithfully he, Dean, or Clift attended the Studio or
studied the method at the feet of Lee Strasberg. In their signature
roles — the most influential performances in the history of American
films — these three performers revealed new kinds of body language and
new ways of delivering dialogue. In the pauses between words, in the
language 'spoken' by their eyes and faces, they gave psychological
realism an unprecedented charge. Verbally inarticulate, they were
eloquent 'speakers' of emotion. Far less protective of their masculinity
than earlier film actors, they enacted emotionally wounded and
vulnerable outsiders struggling for self-understanding, and their work
shimmered with a mercurial neuroticism ... [T]he method-trained
performers in films of the '50s added an enhanced verbal and gesture
naturalism and a more vivid inner life.
In 2012 Strasberg's family donated his library of personal papers to the
Library of Congress.
The papers include 240 boxes containing correspondence, rehearsal
notes, photographs, theatrical drawings and posters, sketches of stage
designs, and more.
Strasberg, his wife
Paula, his daughter
Susan, and his son
John, all appear as characters in
Robert Brustein's 1998 play
Nobody Dies on Friday,
which one critic called a "scathing portrait of Strasberg," but one
that "can by no means be dismissed as a simple act of character
assassination." Brustein, a critic, director, and producer, had
previously made public his dislike of
the method as a philosophy of acting. The play was produced by Brustein's
American Repertory Theater in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was later presented in
Singapore.
Broadway credits
Note: All works are plays and the original productions, unless otherwise noted.
- Four Walls (1927) — actor
- The Vegetable (1929) — director
- Red Rust (1929) — actor
- Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) — actor
- The House of Connelly (1931) — codirector
- 1931 (1931) — director
- Success Story (1932) — director
- Men in White (1933) — director
- Gentlewoman (1934) — director
- Gold Eagle Guy (1934) — director
- Paradise Lost (1935) — produced by Group Theatre
- Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936) — director, produced by Group Theatre
- Johnny Johnson (1936) — director, produced by Group Theatre
- Many Mansions (1937) — director
- Golden Boy (1937) — produced by Group Theatre
- Roosty (1938) — Director* Casey Jones (1938), produced by Group Theatre
- All the Living (1938) — director
- Dance Night (1938) — director
- Rocket to the Moon (1938) — produced by Group Theatre
- The Gentle People (1939) — produced by Group Theatre
- Awake and Sing! (1939), revival — produced by Group Theatre
- Summer Night (1939) — director
- Night Music (1940) — produced by Group Theatre
- The Fifth Column (1940) — director
- Clash by Night (1941) — director
- A Kiss for Cinderella (1942), revival — director
- R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1942), revival — director
- Apology (1943) — producer and director
- South Pacific (1943, apparently no relation to the Broadway musical South Pacific) — director
- Skipper Next to God (1948) — director
- The Big Knife (1949) — director
- The Closing Door (1949) — director
- The Country Girl (1950) — co-producer
- Peer Gynt (1951), (revival) — director
- Strange Interlude (1963), (revival) — produced by The Actors Studio — Tony Award co-nomination for Best Producer of a Play
- Marathon '33 (1963) — production supervisor
- Three Sisters (1964), (revival) — director, produced by the Actors Studio
Film credits
Venezuela
Argentina
Brazil
South Africa
Egypt
Ukraine
Azerbaijan
Turkey
Iran
Colombia
Greece
Russia
Algeria
Kazakhstan
Saudi Arabia
Peru
Spain
Ecuador
Indonesia
India
Portugal
Sri Lanka
Italy
Pakistan
Chile
Mexico
Belgium
Bulgaria
Poland
Canada
France
Australia
Finland
United Kingdom
Hong Kong
Norway
Philippines
New Zealand
United States
Vietnam
Slovakia
Czech Republic
Ireland
Sweden
Austria
Denmark
Singapore
Taiwan
Israel
Romania
Netherlands
Hungary
Malaysia
Germany
Switzerland
South Korea
Thailand
China
Japan
