To think of your own mother's death each time you want to cry onstage is schizophrenic and sick." "You must get away from the real thing because the real thing will limit your acting and cripple you. "Then put your lake in Morocco," Miss Adler replied. One student volunteered, "When you told me to imagine a lake in Switzerland, I couldn't help but remember a real lake I had seen in Switzerland." She also believed that the art, architecture and clothes of an era were important in shaping a role. "The rest is lice." She discussed plays as scripts for actors, exploring the texts for performance clues. "Your talent is in your imagination," she taught. She found he had revised his theories to stress that the actor should create by imagination rather than by memory and that the key to success was "truth, truth in the circumstances of the play." Miss Adler, opposing this approach, went to Paris and studied intensively with Stanislavsky for five weeks in 1934. Strasberg, who headed the Actors Studio until his death in 1982, rooted his view of the Method on what Stanislavsky had stressed in his early career, that the actor should perform extensive "affective memory" exercises, improvising and conjuring up "the conscious past" to convey emotion: for example, dwelling on a personal tragedy to show anguish. Classical acting instruction had focused on developing external talents, while Method acting was the first systematized training that also developed internal abilities, sensory, psychological, emotional. The Method revolutionized American theater. Members of the ensemble were leading interpreters of the Method, the technique based on the work and writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the legendary Moscow Art Theater actor and director, who died in 1938. It was a pivotal movement in the growth of American performing arts, uniting writers, directors and actors in working to shape socially relevant theater. Miss Adler's most frenetic years were with the Group Theater, the experimental Depression-era company founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford.
You can only stimulate what's already there." Often blunt, she told one actress: "You've got no talent! Nothing affects you!" As a young actor mumbled through a monologue, she shouted, "Everything is Hoboken to you!" Miss Adler counseled: "The teacher has to inspire, to agitate. She dares her students to act, to lift their bodies and their voices, to be larger than themselves, to love language and ideas." Her classroom performances were among the most energetic in New York, Foster Hirsch wrote in his 1984 book "A Method to Their Madness." "Stella," he wrote, "is theatrical royalty who instills in her students a sense of the nobility of acting. She kept her students spellbound by raging, purring, cursing, cajoling and, from time to time, complimenting. Mercurial, with honey-blond hair and expressive gray-green eyes, Miss Adler was aristocratic, physically and vocally, and her teaching was passionate, scholarly and volatile, delivered with evangelical showmanship, wicked wit and pungent phrases.
She also shaped the careers of thousands of grateful performers, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Robert De Niro, at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting, which she founded in Manhattan in 1949 and where she taught for decades. She made her stage debut at the age of 4, appeared in nearly 200 plays in the United States and abroad, and occasionally directed productions. Miss Adler was born into a celebrated acting family rooted in the Yiddish theater.
She died of heart failure, said Irene Gilbert, the director of the Stella Adler Conservatory in Hollywood. Stella Adler, an exponent of Method acting whom many considered the leading American teacher of her craft, died yesterday at her home in Los Angeles.
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