Stella Adler

Stella Adler (born Feb. 10, 1901, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 21, 1992, Los Angeles, Calif.) was an American actress, teacher, and founder of the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City (1949), where she tutored performers in “the method” technique of acting (see Stanislavsky method).

Early career

Adler was the daughter of classical Yiddish stage tragedians Jacob and Sara Adler, who formed the organization deemed largely responsible for promoting Yiddish theater in the early 20th-century United States, the Independent Yiddish Art Company. She made her stage debut at age four in one of her father’s productions, Broken Hearts. After that, she received little formal schooling and no formal acting training; instead she studied with her father by watching other actors and learning her craft by observation and performance. In 1919 Adler made her international debut in London, where she remained for a year. Returning to New York City, she played feature roles and performed in vaudeville, later touring Europe and South America as the head of a repertory company. Between 1927 and 1931 she performed more than 100 roles.

In 1931 Adler joined the innovative Group Theater, whose actors were trained in “method acting,” a system propounded by Russian actor and theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky and based on the idea that actors perform by invoking affective memory or a personal memory of the emotion they are trying to portray.

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Method development, teaching, and later work

Adler studied with Stanislavsky in Russia in 1934 and adapted his principles, which in their original form she considered too rigid. Upon her return to the Group Theater, she taught her version of Stanislavsky’s method. In her classes Adler taught that drawing on personal experience alone was too limited. She encouraged performers to draw on their imaginations as well.

In the early 1940s Adler began teaching acting at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She remained there until 1949, when she established the Stella Adler Theater Studio (later renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting and now the Stella Adler Studio of Acting). The likes of Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Benicio Del Toro have been trained in Adler’s acting studio. While conducting her own school, she also taught at Yale University’s School of Drama (1966–67) and headed New York University’s drama department in the 1980s. Adler herself performed until 1961.

In addition to acting and teaching, Adler worked as an associate producer for MGM in the early 1940s, directed commercial theater in New York City throughout the 1940s and ’50s, and wrote The Technique of Acting (1988). The second of her three marriages was to Harold Clurman, one of the founding members of the Group Theater; it lasted from 1943 to 1960.