├PARA ╗PAR@ ` √TEXT ` φAdler, Stella1901╨1992actor, director and acting teacherBorn in New York City on February 10, probably in 1901, Stella Adler grew up in a theater family. Her father, Jacob P. Adler, often called ╥the Henry Irving of Yiddish theater,╙ was an actor and manager as was her mother, Sarah Lewis (originally Sara Levitsky). After her parents emigrated to the U.S. from Russia at the turn of the century, they gained prominence as tragedians of the Yiddish stage and formed the organization deemed largely responsible for promoting Yiddish theater in early twentieth-century America, the Adlers╒ Independent Yiddish Art Company. In addition, all of Adler╒s seven siblings became actors and actresses in their own right: Frances, Celia, Julia, Luther, Jay, Abe, and Charles. As she said: ╥In my family, immediately you could barely walk, you were put on the stage.╙She made her stage debut at age four at New York╒s Grand Street Theater in her father╒s production of Broken Hearts. After that, she received little formal schooling, either in the three R╒s or in the art of acting; instead she studied with her father by watching other actors and actresses, and by performing herself in both boy and girl roles in her parents╒ company as well as in other theater companies. In 1919 Adler made her international debut in the role of Naomi in Elisha Ben Avia in London at the Pavilion Theatre. Returning to New York the following year, she played feature roles, performed in vaudeville, and toured Europe and South America as the head of a repertory company. Between 1927 and 1931 she performed over a hundred roles. In 1931, she joined the innovative Group Theater, an organization founded on the principle of artistic unity and comprised of people representing all parts of a production, including actors and actresses, writers, designers and directors. The players were trained by Lee Strasberg in ╥Method acting,╙ a system propounded by Russian actor and theater director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, based on the idea that actors peform by invoking affective memory or a personal memory of the emotion they are trying to portray. After studying with Stanislavsky in Russia in 1933, she revised his principles, which she considered too rigid and unhealthy. She returned to the Group Theater to teach acting and completely transformed its acting style, even though her new style challenged Strasberg and even though she was frustrated with the Group Theater for being, in her word, ╥a man╒s theater ╔ aimed at plays for men.╙ Her last performance there was as Clara in Clifford Odets╒s Paradise Lost in 1935.In her classes, Adler taught that drawing on personal experience alone was too limited. She believed instead that the actor should use his or her imagination to create characters. She told her students: ╥Don╒t use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don╒t want you to be stuck with your own life. It╒s too little.╙ In the early 1940s, she began teaching acting at Erwin Piscator╒s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1949 she left and established the Stella Adler Theater Studio, where young performers could both study and act. In 1960 the school was renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting. While teaching at her own school, she also taught at Yale University╒s School of Drama from 1966 to 1967 and headed New York University╒s drama department in the 1980s. Adler herself performed up until 1961, giving her final performance in London. As a teacher, Adler mentored such personalities as Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro, among scores of other actors and actresses.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 1950s, and published her own book on acting, The Technique of Acting, 1988. She was married three times; briefly to Horace Eleascheff, then to Harold Clurman, one of the founding members of the Group Theater, from 1943 to 1960, and finally to Mitchell Wilson, a physicist and novelist, who died in 1973. She had one daughter, Ellen, from her first marriage. Adler died at home in Los Angeles on December 21, 1992. Ästyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ < !I !I ▐ A !I d 5¬ e !I ╦ !I ╪ !I 5¬ !I D !I S !I [ 5¬ \ !I b 5¬ c !I
+ !I
8 !I
B 5¬
C !I !I !I S !I Y !I ╚ 5¬ ╔ !I ₧ 5¬ ƒ !I x !I Å !I link ` HYPR A
