At the peak of their Group Theatre glory, Stella Adler with her brother Luther Adler (right) and playwright Clifford Odets in London on June 13, 1938. As is evident, Stella was the epitome of theatricality, believing that you must be bigger than life in art, and she certainly was in life, too.
What is rarely mentioned is that Stella’s difficulty in achieving movie-stardom had a lot to do with the unspoken anti-Semitic attitude of the country at that time. Stella’s looks and name were considered “too Jewish.” She reluctantly—and always a bit shamefacedly—allowed her billing in Love on Toast to be “Stella Ardler.” When Luther Adler, a superb, underappreciated actor himself, was told that the Jewish studio heads wanted to change her name, he suggested they just call her “Beverly Wilshire” (a reference to the famous L.A. hotel), and added, “then they can call me Bullocks Wilshire” (a then-popular department store).
In Brando’s 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, this most famous of Stella’s students wrote:
Stella … left an astounding legacy. Virtually all acting in motion pictures today stems from her, and she had an extraordinary effect on the culture of her time. I don’t think audiences realize how much we are in debt to her.
The techniques she brought back to this country [from Stanislavski], and taught others, changed acting enormously. First she passed them on to the other members of the Group Theatre [of the 1930s], and then to actors like me who became her students. We plied our trade according to the manner and style she taught us; and since American movies dominate the world market, Stella’s teachings have influenced actors throughout the world.
Stella always said no one could teach acting, but she could…. She could tell you not only when you were wrong, but why…. If I hit a sour note in a scene, she knew it immediately and said, “No, wait, wait, wait … that’s wrong!” and then dug into her large reserve of intuitive intelligence to explain why my character would behave in a certain way based on the author’s vision. Her instincts were unerring and extraordinary…. Because of Stella, acting changed completely during the ’50s and ’60s …
Although the Stanislavski “method” came to be associated with the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Brando, Stella Adler was the only American who actually ever worked and studied with the great Russian director himself. She spent considerable time in Paris with him and came back with voluminous notes. She shared these first with the Group Theatre—of which Strasberg, Kazan and director-teacher Robert Lewis were a part—and eventually with all her students through the years. Bobby Lewis wrote a best-selling actors’ handbook, Method—or Madness, virtually all of it based on Stella Adler’s notes.
Besides teaching choreographers such as Alvin Ailey and Jerome Robbins, actor-directors like Warren Beatty, Sydney Pollock, and me, and popular singers like Janis Ian and Diana Ross, Stella was most noted for having taught such other celebrated actors as James Coburn, Kevin Costner, Benicio Del Toro, Teri Garr, Harvey Keitel, Cloris Leachman, Karl Malden, Bette Midler, Matthew Modine, Anthony Quinn, John Ritter, Martin Sheen, Elaine Stritch, Leslie Uggams, Henry Winkler, Shelley Winters, and many more. The influence she had on stage and screen will endure as long as the art.
I entered this astonishing, inspiring and beautiful woman’s studio when I was sixteen (having lied by two years to get in) and she became, over the next thirty-seven years until her death in 1992, my second mother, outliving my own mother by more than a decade. Though she never directed a movie, and directed only once or twice for the stage, Stella taught acting in such an inclusive way that she also was teaching directing. Not only because it’s difficult to be a good director if you don’t know or share in the actors’ problems, but also because Stella taught a theater of “heightened reality”—seemingly against the very naturalism that movie acting generally encourages—but in keeping with the mythic proportions natural to the stage, to the theatrical-film medium, to the highest kind of artistic expression. Stella’s truth insisted on dealing with something much more sizeable and weighty than a mere naturalistic representation of events; just as the greatest achievements of the stage and screen ultimately have been larger than life in their depiction of human archetypes.
Stella was one of the two most brilliant actors’ directors I ever worked with, Orson Welles being the other. I only had the privilege with Stella for a short time on her striking, profoundly moving off-Broadway production of the Kurt Weill–Paul Green pacifist World War I musical drama, Johnny Johnson. The Group Theatre had premiered the play in the late thirties and Stella’s off-Broadway revival in the mid-fifties was its first time back in New York. Stella was an extraordinarily specific director with the artistic eye of a hawk, and a vivid imagination. She rehearsed for months—as Stanislavski did—and since most of the cast were her students, no one thought of complaining or asking for money. She was so inspiring, brought such size, depth and resonance to everything. Sadly, she had to let me go while we were still in rehearsal. They had found out my real age and I was “too young” (as Stella put it) for them to afford me under Actors Equity rules and state laws about minors.
She fiddled with my bow tie as she broke the bad news to me one afternoon. “You’re too young, darling,” she said, sympathetically. And that’s about all she said, however, forgetting, in her absentminded way, to explain that my age was a problem because of money and child-labor laws, not because I was too immature to play the role. (For an awfully long time, I didn’t realize what she had meant, and it certainly did trouble me.) Although it was not a popular success, I saw two performances featuring a huge cast led by Matthew Broderick’s talented father, James Broderick (who died young)—and it remains high among the most powerful theater experiences of my life.
There was another time, in class, that she said I was “too young,” but this time she explained what she meant with one of the most brilliant acting images I’ve heard. Having seen the extraordinary Jason Robards, Jr.’s performance in the lead role of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh—as it was revived very successfully by José Quintero in the fifties—I was so inspired by Robards’ work that I memorized his character Hickey’s famous final monologue, which ran for something like ten minutes, and performed it in Stella’s class. I was seventeen. Afterward, she stood up, joined in the applause and then said to me, “Very good, darling, but you’re too young for the part.” She hesitated a beat, pursing her lips reflectively, and then went on, “You see, darling, when you walk down the street, you walk out near the curb …”—she paused a bit—“but this character does not. He walks close to the buildings.” How many times over the years since have I noted where on the sidewalk I (or others) would unconsciously walk, as an indication of one’s spiritual health. On other occasions, regarding age, she would say, “Never play your own age, darling. Either play younger than you are or older than you are. Playing your own age is boring!”
Age also was relative in the Adler family. Arthur Miller once told me that he had been at Stella’s fiftieth birthday party and that her mother was there, too. Someone asked the elder Mrs. Adler her age and she said she was sixty-two. But, the person protested, how could that be—Stella being fifty? To which the mother replied, “That’s her problem.”
For four years I never missed a class Stella taught. And she was teaching all her famous ones then: the scene-breakdown class (where she would brilliantly analyze the text and style of the playwright, from Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw and Ibsen, to Odets, Miller, Williams and Inge); the characterization class (in which she would work on the inner and outer features of a personality as revealed in the text); the crucial basics (sense-memory, handling invisible props, really looking at things and people, really listening).
Her very presence and intensity of focus were like pure oxygen, and equally intoxicating. You never knew what she was going to say. She would watch a scene, for example, with such palpable attention that she often got deeply into the emotions of the given material. You could see her over in the corner by stag
e right silently acting out all the parts, grasping her breast in agony, stifling a sob. She would shake her head or nod, or lean forward, or freeze except to purse her lips repeatedly, completely lost in the moment. One time a student was doing a really bad job on Hamlet’s soliloquy (“To be or not to be”), but you couldn’t tell from Stella’s expression. We all felt he was murdering it, yet Stella just leaned farther forward, pursing her lips, occasionally shaking her head in sympathy, enthralled throughout. When he finished—as poorly as he had begun—Stella didn’t speak for a long time. She sat, nodding quietly, thinking. Nobody moved. Finally, she shook her head and stood, saying, “Well …” and, looking beatific, said, “it’s a great play!”
Stella’s way of teaching was in direct contrast to Lee Strasberg’s (in his book Brando heavily denigrates the Strasberg manner), which searched out “stage reality” from an actor’s memory—especially memories that just by the touching of which could create the necessary emotions. For those actors who turned to this technique exclusively (which Stanislavski had in no way favored), Strasberg became a beacon. For others—although he was considered a brilliant analyst of what went on in scene-study classes (often dazzling guest playwrights and directors; see Marilyn Monroe chapter)—he wasn’t really a very good teacher. Brando said he found unbearable Strasberg’s focus on the actor’s own underlying personality.
Adler insisted, rather, that an actor use imagination, concentrating on the specific character’s situation and circumstances. As she saw it, much of the role was dictated by the text itself and the particular style of the playwright, rather than by the actor’s personal emotional history. She would say, “You don’t act with the same style in a play by Shakespeare as you do in a play by Oscar Wilde, or as you do in Tennessee Williams.” She would say that “acting is 50 percent interior and 50 percent exterior.” The two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy recently described the process she learned from Stella as the actor’s becoming “a kind of sponge for humanity.” Adler taught that clothes, accent, personal props, walk, stance, all of this, was certainly as important as the inner workings of emotion.
She believed in personal conviction: if the actor believed, the audience would. On stage once, she would relate, she had to open a drawer, take out a pistol and shoot someone, but this night the drawer was empty so she just reached in anyway, came out with her hand shaped like a gun, said “Bang!” very loudly, the other actor reacted and, she concluded triumphantly, “No one in the entire audience noticed!” She encouraged work on different accents and on taking characteristics from animals. I remember a hilarious impression she did of an addled kitten having been played with by a rambunctious child, or an amazingly accurate and funny take on English intellectuals—all brains and no grace. Certainly she believed in the ability of art to transform people and society by revealing essential human and poetic truths. The actor had to find this in himself, in his work. “Of course,” she would say, as though it were self-evident, “you have to play yourself, darling. Who else can you play? But you have to find the character in yourself—we are all many people.”
With Stella, it was never about fame or success. Though she wasn’t the village-garret type of art-for-art’s-sake revolutionary, she believed in artistic integrity and felt that in America, because it was such a young country, the tradition of culture and artistic morality was not very finely developed. “It takes more than two hundred years to become an American,” was her roundabout way of saying that two hundred years was an awfully short time in the vast sweep of history and art that preceded America’s formation, and that among the things not yet gained is a respect for tradition and a truly civilized culture. One of the plays she taught was Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy—she and Odets, of course, were old friends and coworkers from the days of the Group. She broke the play down in riveting detail as the essential struggle between financial and artistic success, between brute force and poetic expression, between naturalism and spirituality. One afternoon, as Stella was discussing this drama, I was sitting on top of an old wardrobe trunk over at the left in her studio. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen by now. Suddenly, Stella pointed directly at me and said, loudly, “There he is! There’s the Golden Boy!” Everyone looked at me. She added nothing more about me or why she had said that but went right on to connect Odets’ play to the Faust legend.
I just sat there, trying to figure out what the hell she meant and wondering why I had been singled out. It took me several years to put it all together, and by then I’d already fallen prey, at least in part, to the dangers she warned against. Stella’s lifelong injunctions to me of integrity—practically every time I saw or spoke with her—kept bringing me back to the right path more often than not. She would always refer to my parents as artists—she had been to their apartment for a dinner party or two; seen my father’s paintings, my mother’s gold-leaf frames. As she did with her own father—also a European artist transplanted to the United States—Stella held up my parents as examples of high quality and artistic purity.
Not that she had any aversion to money or luxury. She used to joke on the square: “I don’t know what’s the matter with young actresses these days—they’re only interested in Chekhov. When I was starting out, actresses were only interested in diamonds!” Having acquired (for a while) a mansion in Bel Air and a vintage Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, I found that Stella loved both. Taking a ride in the Rolls one time she said, “Darling, this is definitely the way an artist should live!” Certainly, as long as I knew Stella, she always lived in a grand fashion, with a large Fifth Avenue apartment, and comfortable rented houses in Los Angeles. She always dressed like a star of the theater.
Yet she never compromised for material success. In fact, she quit acting because she couldn’t bear the competitive pressures of stardom and commercialization. All this was summed up in the way she responded to me when I asked her once why she had stopped performing. She shook her head slowly, looking very sad. “I couldn’t anymore, darling.” She shook her head again, as if to say the pain was too much, and repeated, “I couldn’t anymore.”
Stella Adler (center) played twenty-five years older than she was in her most famous role, as the aging mother in Clifford Odets’ acclaimed thirties drama, Awake and Sing!, produced on Broadway by the Group Theatre in 1935, directed by Harold Clurman. Soon to be a movie star, Jules (later John) Garfield (standing) played her son. Others in the cast included brother Luther Adler (not pictured), Phoebe Brand (far right), and Art Smith (center).
But she could teach, and she acted constantly in class—with such intuitive brilliance, with a technique so well tuned, it was beyond second nature. I believe she could transform herself into any character, any animal, any style, any period. She was kinder, generally speaking, to men than to women, but she could be brutal with either sex. In the mid-fifties, to one young actor who was playing a scene with all the mannerisms Brando had brought to his role in A Streetcar Named Desire, she shouted in the midst of the performance: “Stop it! Marlon isn’t like that!” She asked another student and me to improvise two people in the woods, and after I said one line—something like “Should I get some firewood?”—she cried out, “Stop it! Don’t write a bad play!” She could be equally brief and succinct if she liked what you had done. One exercise was to take a pop song or folk song and act out the lyrics rather than sing them. I chose, as purposely far from my own upbringing, a song Harry Belafonte had recently recorded called “I’m Just a Country Boy.” When I finished, Stella only said, quietly, “Bravo, darling.”
There were so many things Stella said that one carried forever, because you kept realizing at various ages how true they were, deepening as the years passed: A young actor, reacting to a criticism of Stella’s, said, “But I felt it.” Stella responded quickly and sharply: “It doesn’t matter what you feel, darling, it’s what the audience feels.” Another time, another young actor said he didn’t feel comfortable with some movement Stella had asked for. “The stage is no place to be comforta
ble. You’re on a platform, darling, remember that.”
She reacted similarly when I directed for the first time. I had rehearsed five of Stella’s students in a long scene from Odets’ The Big Knife (see Introduction). In her classes, normally scenes were never directed, and almost exclusively featured only two actors at a time. When ours was finished, Stella stood as though triumphant, and led the sizeable applause, then said: “But you’ve been directed! Who directed you!?” The actors, still on stage, all pointed toward the back of the studio where I was leaning against a wall and a couple said, “Peter.” Stella looked proudly at me and said only three words: “Brilliant, darling! Bravo!” My first review as a director and still my favorite. This encouragement led straight to my directing (and co-producing) Odets’ play off-Broadway as my first theater production, in November 1959. Stella came to see it and stayed seated in the middle of the theater until everyone had gone. She had been wiping her eyes, embraced me with seriousness and said of my humanist interpretation, “It’s a bold and daring statement.” My second favorite review.
The funny thing was that she sometimes watched movies or plays as though they were being presented in her scene class. When Brando’s film The Young Lions was about to open, I was by then on the studios’ screening lists for critics and tastemakers, and therefore invited to a special advance running at 20th Century–Fox’s 57th Street projection room. Knowing Stella’s fondness for Brando, I asked if she’d like to come with me. She said yes, and the two of us arrived when most of the other 250 guests were already seated. Brando’s German officer doesn’t appear in the movie for quite a while, during which time Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift as American soldiers are lengthily introduced. Stella tilted her head to me slightly: “Who’s that?” I told her it was Dean Martin. A little later: “Who’s that?” Montgomery Clift. The movie cross-cuts between these two for a while. “Who’s that?” Dean Martin. “He’s quite good,” she said, and then, after a while, “Who’s that?” Montgomery Clift. She shook her head. “He wasn’t good there.” All of this was fairly sotto voce. Finally, when Brando appeared in his Nazi uniform, blond hair and German accent, Stella gave no reaction for about two minutes and then, suddenly, in full voice she said, “My God, it’s Marlon!” I would like to have sunk under my seat from then on because she was so absorbed by Brando that to her nobody else was there. “My God,” she continued after a moment, still full voice, “he’s so German!”
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