The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute - New York Reviews

American histrion, drama teacher, interim autobus, theorist

Lee Strasberg
Strasberg in 1976
Built-in	Israel Strassberg (1901-11-17)Nov 17, 1901 Budzanów, Austrian Poland (at present Budaniv, Ukraine)
Died	Feb 17, 1982(1982-02-17) (aged 80) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Actor manager interim charabanc drama teacher
Years agile	1925–1982
Known for	Instruction method interim Founder of the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute
Spouse(south)	Nora Krecaum ​ ​ (thousand. ; died 1929)​ Paula Miller ​ ​ (m. 1935; died 1966)​ Anna Mizrahi ​ (m. 1967)​
Children	4, including Susan and John Strasberg

Lee Strasberg (built-in State of israel Lee Strassberg;^{[one] [two]} November 17, 1901 – February 17, 1982) was a Polish-born^[3] American actor, theatre and film managing director, acting coach and drama teacher.^[four] He co-founded, with theatre directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America'south first truthful theatrical collective".^[5] In 1951, he became manager of the nonprofit Actors Studio in New York City, considered "the nation'due south almost prestigious acting school,"^[6] and, in 1966, was involved in the creation of Actors Studio Westward in Los Angeles.

Although other highly regarded teachers also developed versions of "The Method", Lee Strasberg is considered to be the "father of method interim in America", co-ordinate to author Mel Gussow. 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 motion picture."^[i] From his base in New York, Strasberg 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 Folio, Eli Wallach, and directors Andreas Voutsinas, Frank Perry and Elia Kazan.^[i]

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 pedagogy the 'organization' of Konstantin Stanislavski, which he had interpreted and developed, especially in light of the ideas of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, for contemporary actors. The Plant'southward primary stated goal was "to reach a larger audition of eager and emerging talent"^[vii] than was served past the Actors Studio's notoriously selective admission process,^[6] and as teachers of the method introduced their own personal interpretations of the discipline, "to dispel growing defoliation and misrepresentation of the method, preserving what had by at present go fundamental discoveries in histrion training."^[7] The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Found has its ain rigorous sets of archway criteria required for admission into their program.^[eight]

Old student Elia Kazan directed James Dean in East of Eden (1955), for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. As a pupil, Dean wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest school of the theater [and] the all-time thing that tin can happen to an actor."^[9] Playwright Tennessee Williams, writer of A Streetcar Named Desire, said of Strasberg's actors, "They deed from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They requite you a sense of life." Directors such as Sidney Lumet, a former student, accept intentionally used actors skilled in Strasberg's "method".^[10]

Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch dr., a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home... [He] was the force that held the 30-odd members of the theatre together, and made them 'permanent'."^{[11] : 61} Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this not-profit studio dedicated to the evolution of actors, playwrights, and directors.

As an actor, Strasberg is probably all-time known for his supporting part as gangster Hyman Roth aslope his former student Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II (1974), a part he took at Pacino's proposition after Kazan turned downwardly the part, and which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He likewise appeared in Going in Style (1979) and ... And Justice for All (1979).^[12]

Strasberg'southward personal papers, including photos, are archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Early years [edit]

Lee Strasberg was born Israel Strassberg in Budzanów in Austrian Poland (role of Austria-hungary, now in Ukraine), to Jewish parents,^[13] 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 starting time for his eldest son and his daughter. Finally, enough coin was saved to bring over his wife and his two remaining sons. In 1909 the family was reunited on Manhattan'southward Lower Eastward 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 flu pandemic was so traumatic for the young Strasberg that, despite being a straight-A student, he dropped out of high school.^[14]

A relative introduced him to the theatre by giving him a small function in a Yiddish-language production existence performed by the Progressive Drama Lodge. He later joined the Chrystie Street Settlement House's drama club. Philip Loeb, casting director of the Theater Guild, sensed that Strasberg could deed, although he was non yet thinking of a full-fourth dimension interim 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 of america denizen on January sixteen, 1939, in New York City at the New York Southern District Courtroom.^{[ citation needed ]}

Come across with Stanislavski [edit]

Kazan biographer Richard Schickel described Strasberg's kickoff experiences with the fine art of acting:

He dropped out of loftier schoolhouse, worked in a shop that made hairpieces, drifted into the theater via a settlement house visitor and ... had his life-shaping revelation when Stanislavski brought his Moscow Fine art Theatre to the U.s. 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]eastward observed, showtime 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 of import, every actor seemed to project some sort of unspoken, nevertheless palpable, inner life for his or her character. This was acting of a sort that one rarely saw on the American phase ... 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 express. But he shortly perceived that as a theoretician and teacher of this new 'system' it might get a major forcefulness in American theater.^[15]

Strasberg somewhen left the Clare Tree Major Schoolhouse to written report with students of Stanislavski—Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslawski—at the American Laboratory Theatre. In 1925 Strasberg had his beginning professional appearance in Processional, a play produced by the Theater Social club.^[xvi]

According to Schickel:

What Strasberg ... took abroad from the Actors Lab was a belief that just equally an role player could be prepared physically for his work with dance, movement, and fencing classes, he could exist mentally prepared by resort to analogous mental exercises. They worked on relaxation too equally concentration. They worked with nonexistent objects that helped prepare them for the exploration of equally ephemeral emotions. They learned to utilise "affective retention," as Strasberg called the nigh controversial aspect of his educational activity—summoning emotions from their ain lives to illuminate their stage roles. ... Strasberg believed he could codify this system, a necessary precursor to educational activity it to anyone who wanted to learn it. ... [H]e became a managing director more than preoccupied with getting his actors to work in the "correct" fashion than he was in shaping the overall presentation.^[15]

Interim director and teacher [edit]

Group Theater [edit]

He gained a reputation with the Theater Club of New York and helped grade the Group Theater in New York in 1931.^[17] 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 upward by the training of actors. Called "America's beginning true theatrical collective," the Group Theater immediately offered a few tuition-gratuitous scholarships for its 3-yr program to "promising students."^[18]

Publishers Weekly wrote, "The Group Theatre ... with its self-defined mission to reconnect theater to the globe 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 sick-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."^[19] Playwright Arthur Miller said "the Grouping Theatre was unique and probably will never exist repeated. For a while it was literally the vocalism of Depression America." Co-founder Harold Clurman, in describing what Strasberg brought to the Group Theater, wrote:

Lee Strasberg is 1 of the few artists among American theater directors. He is the director of introverted feeling, of strong emotion curbed by ascetic command, sentiment of groovy intensity muted by effeminateness, pride, fearfulness, shame. The effect he produces is a archetype hush, tense and tragic, a constant conflict and so held in bank check that a kind of cute spareness results. The roots are clearly in the intimate experience of a complex psychology, an astute awareness of human contradiction and suffering.^[i]

Strasberg, Kazan, Clurman, and others with the Group Theater spent the summertime of 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club, located in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut.^{[20] [21]} They spent previous summers at various places in upstate New York and near Danbury, Connecticut.

Amid internecine tensions, Strasberg resigned as director of the Grouping Theatre in March 1937.^[22]

Actors Studio [edit]

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.^[17] Strasberg assumed leadership of the studio in 1951 equally 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 land of New York, and has been supported entirely by contributions and benefits. ... We accept here the possibility of creating a kind of theatre that would exist 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 profoundly to Strasberg'south utterly pragmatic views on grooming the actor and solving his problems. ... [and] is kept deliberately modest in its circumstances, its essence beingness the private room where Lee Strasberg and some talented actors can work."

Strasberg wrote: "At the studio, nosotros do not sit down around and feed each other's egos. People are shocked how astringent we are on each other."^[i] Access to the Actors Studio was usually by audience with more a thousand actors auditioning each year and the directors usually conferring membership on only five or 6 each year. "The Studio was, and is sui generis," said Elia Kazan, proudly. Beginning in a small, private mode, 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 virtually promising and unconventional young actors were being cultivated past sharp immature directors."^[23] 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, Factor Wilder, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, and Emerge Field.^{[6] [1]}

The Emmy Award-winning author of Inside Inside, James Lipton, writes that the Actors Studio became "i of the most prestigious institutions in the world" as a outcome of its desire to set a higher "standard" in acting.^[6] The founders, including Strasberg, demanded total commitment and extreme talent from aspiring students. Jack Nicholson auditioned five times before he was accustomed; Dustin Hoffman, half dozen times; and Harvey Keitel, 11 times. After each rejection, a candidate had to wait every bit long every bit a year to try over again. Martin Landau and Steve McQueen were the only 2 students admitted one year, out of 2000 candidates who auditioned.^[six]

• Al Pacino: "The Actors Studio meant and so much to me in my life. Lee Strasberg hasn't been given the credit he deserves. Brando doesn't give Lee any credit ... Adjacent 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."^[24]
• Marlon Brando: Movie stars spawned past 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,"^[25] merely 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 interim technique on the method, once stating, "It made me a real actor. The idea is you lot acquire to utilize everything that happened in your life and you learn to apply it in creating the character you lot're working on. You learn how to dig into your unconscious and make use of every feel yous've ever had."^[1]

In Brando'southward autobiography, Songs My Female parent Taught Me, the actor claimed he learned aught from Strasberg: "After I had some success, Lee Strasberg tried to accept credit for teaching me how to act. He never taught me annihilation. He would take claimed credit for the sunday and the moon if he believed he could get away with it. He tried to project himself equally an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him, and I never knew why. I sometimes went to the Actors Studio on Sat 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."^[26]

• James Dean: Co-ordinate to James Dean biographer Due west. Bast, "Proud of this accomplishment, Dean referred to the studio in a 1952 letter, when he was 21 years onetime, to his family unit equally 'The greatest school of the theater. Information technology houses neat people similar Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Mildred Dunnock. ... Very few get into it. ... Information technology's the best thing that can happen to an actor. I'm one of the youngest to belong.'"^[ix]
• Marilyn Monroe: Pic author Maurice Zolotow wrote: "Betwixt The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot simply four years elapsed, only her world had inverse. She had become one of the most celebrated personalities in the globe. She had divorced Joe DiMaggio. She had married Arthur Miller. She had get a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She was seriously studying acting. She was reading good books."^[27]
• Tennessee Williams: Tennessee Williams' plays have been populated past graduates of the studio, where he felt, "studio actors had a more intense and honest style of interim." He wrote, "They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give yous a sense of life."^[1] Williams was a co-founder of the grouping and a key fellow member of its playwright's wing; he subsequently wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando'southward greatest early role.^[28]
• Jane Fonda: Jane Fonda recalled that at the historic period of 5, her brother, player 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 2 years to study art. Upon returning, she met Lee Strasberg and the coming together changed the course of her life, Fonda saying, "I went to the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Existent talent. It was the first fourth dimension 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 virtually acting. Information technology was like the roof had come off my life!"^[29]

Pedagogy methods and philosophy [edit]

In describing his didactics 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 tin can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the graphic symbol."^[30] Strasberg demanded nifty subject of his actors, too as great depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his arroyo in this way:

The human beingness who acts is the man 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 however this must happen not only but equally it happens in life, merely [as well] actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the aforementioned matter on the phase nether fictitious conditions, he has difficulty considering he is non equipped as a human but 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 phase.

According to motion-picture show critic/writer Mel Gussow, Strasberg required that an thespian, when preparing for a part, delve not merely into the character's life in the play only also, "Far more than importantly, into the character's life earlier the drapery 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 graphic symbol's being."^[1]

Elia Kazan as pupil [edit]

In Elia Kazan's autobiography, the Academy Award–winning director wrote about his earliest memories of Strasberg equally teacher:

He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch md, a psychoanalyst, and a feared begetter of a Jewish abode. He was the center of the camp's activities that summer, the core of the vortex. Everything in camp revolved around him. Preparing to directly the play that was to open the coming season, as he had the three plays of the season earlier, he would also give the basic didactics in interim, laying downwards 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 past the threat of his anger. ... He enjoyed his eminence just every bit the admiral would. Actors are as cocky-favoring as the rest of humanity, and mayhap the only manner they could exist held together to practice their work properly was past the threat of an authority they respected. And feared. No one questioned his dominance—he spoke holy writ—his leading office in that summertime'southward activities, and his right to all power. To win his favor became everyone'south 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 homo, the Group would fly apart, anybody going in unlike directions instead of to where he was pointing. ... I was afraid of him too. Even as I admired him. Lee was making an creative revolution and knew it. An arrangement such as the Group – so in its 2nd year, which is to say still beginning, even so being shaped—lives only by the will of a fanatic and the bulldoze with which he propels his vision. He has to be unswerving, uncompromising, and unadjustable. Lee knew this. He'd studied other revolutions, political and creative. He knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his mission and its importance.^{[eleven] : 59}

Classroom settings [edit]

Kazan described the classes taught by Strasberg:

At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid downwards 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 brand the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, concrete and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the role player's past. Information technology is the same equally when we accidentally hear a tune nosotros may accept heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and notice, to our surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The role player 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 past 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 most to play. 'Take a minute!' became the watchword of that summertime, the phrase heard most ofttimes, merely as this particular kind of inner concentration became the trademark of Lee'south own work when he directed a production. His actors frequently appeared to be in a state of cocky-hypnosis.^{[xi] : 61}

James Dean [edit]

James Dean in E of Eden

In 1955 Strasberg student James Dean died in a car blow, at age 24. Strasberg, during a regular lecture shortly after this blow, discussed Dean. The post-obit are excerpts from a transcription of his recorded lecture:

(In the centre 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 deport when I say information technology; I don't remember it will bother me. But I saw Jimmy Dean in Giant the other nighttime, and I must say that— (he weeps) You see, that's what I was agape of. [A long interruption] When I got in the cab, I cried. ... What I cried at was the waste product, the waste. ... If there is anything in the theatre to which I respond more than than anything else—perchance I'1000 getting onetime, or maybe I'm getting sentimental—it is the waste material in the theatre, the talent that gets upwardly and the work that goes into getting information technology up and getting it where it should exist. And then when it gets there, what the hell happens with information technology? The senseless destruction, the senseless waste, the hopping about from ane affair to the next, the waste of the talent, the waste matter of your lives, the foreign kind of behavior that non just Jimmy had, you meet, merely that a lot of yous here take and a lot of other actors take that are going through exactly the same matter. ... As soon every bit yous grow upwardly as actors, as shortly equally you achieve a certain place, there it goes, the drunkenness and the rest of information technology, as if, at present that you've really made information technology, the incentive goes, and something happens which to me is just terrifying. I don't know what to do. ... The only answer maybe is that we somehow hither discover a way, a ways, an system, a plan [that] should really contribute to the theatre, so that there should not only be the abiding stimulus to your individual development, which I think we have provided, simply as well that once your individual development is established, information technology should then actually contribute to the theatre, rather than to an adventitious succession of skilful, bad, or indifferent things. Only I am very, very scared that despite how strongly I feel, or despite how stimulated you become, zippo will be washed. ... [A]nd we volition just keep to get so caught up that in a strange manner nosotros do not really live our lives. ... To me that is the future of the Studio, that a unified torso of people should somehow be connected with a tangible, consequent, and continuous try. That is the dream I have always had. That is what got me into theatre in the first identify. That was the thing that got me involved in The Actors Studio ... and at present it becomes time to call back a little bit more almost our responsibility for that private talent. ... I'grand stuck. I don't know. And this is really the problem of the Studio.

On Marilyn Monroe [edit]

In 1962 Marilyn Monroe died at historic period 36. At the fourth dimension of her death, she was at the pinnacle of her career. In 1999 she was ranked the sixth-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Moving-picture show Institute. Strasberg gave the eulogy at her funeral.^{[31] [32]}

For united states, 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 fellow member of our family. ... Information technology is difficult to accept the fact that her zest for life has been ended by this dreadful accident. Despite the heights and luminescence she had attained on the screen, she was planning for the future. She was looking forrad to participating in the many heady things. In her eyes, and in mine, her career was merely first. ... She had a luminous quality. A combination of wistfulness, radiance, and yearning that set her apart and made everyone wish to exist part of it—to share in the childish naiveté which was at once and then shy and all the same and so vibrant.

Personal life [edit]

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 jitney Paula Miller (1909–1966) until her death from cancer in 1966. They were the parents of extra Susan Strasberg (1938–1999) and acting teacher John Strasberg (born 1941). His third wife was the former Anna Mizrahi (b. Apr xvi, 1939) and the female parent of his two youngest children, Adam Lee Strasberg (b. July 29, 1969) and David Lee State of israel Strasberg (b. Jan 30, 1971).

Expiry and commemoration [edit]

On February 17, 1982, Lee Strasberg suffered a fatal eye attack in New York Metropolis, aged eighty.^{[i] [33]} With him at the fourth dimension of his decease at the hospital were his 3rd married woman, 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 fourteen, 1982, at Night of 100 Stars in the Radio Urban center Music Hall, a do good for the Actors Fund of America. Along with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, he danced in the chorus line with The Rockettes.^[1]

Actress Ellen Burstyn recalled that evening:

Late in the evening, I wandered into the greenroom and saw Lee sitting adjacent to Anna, watching the taping on the monitor. I saturday next to him and we chatted a little. Lee wasn't one for pocket-sized talk, so I didn't stay long. But earlier I got up, I said, 'Lee, I've been asked to run for president of Actors Disinterestedness.' He reached over and patted me on the back, 'That's wonderful, dahling. Congratulations.' Those were the final words he ever said to me. ... Two days later on, 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 simply 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, merely 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 get to when I was in problem?. ... His memorial service was held at the Shubert Theater where A Chorus Line was playing. Lee'southward coffin was brought downward the aisle and placed center stage. Everybody in the theater globe came—actors, writers, directors, producers, and most, if not all of, his students. He was a behemothic of the theater and was deeply mourned. Those of us who had the great good fortune to be fertilized and quickened past his genius would feel the loss of him for the rest of our lives.^[34]

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 salubrious until the twenty-four hour period he died. "It was then unexpected," Al Pacino said. "What stood out was how youthful he was. He never seemed every bit old every bit his years. He was an inspiration." Extra Jane Fonda said after hearing of his expiry, "I'm non certain I fifty-fifty would accept go an actress were it non for him. He will be missed, only he leaves behind a not bad legacy."

Legacy [edit]

"Whether directly influenced by Strasberg or not," wrote interim author Pamela Wojcik, "the new male stars all to some caste or other adapted method techniques to support their identification every bit rebels. ... He recreates romance as a drama of male neuroticism and likewise invests his characterization 'with an unprecedented aureola of verisimilitude.'"^[35] Acting teacher and author Alison Hodge explains: "Seemingly spontaneous, intuitive, heart-searching, '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 non) Lee Strasberg devoted his life to exploring and promoting."^[36] Pamela Wojcik adds:

Considering of their trend to substitute their personal feelings for those of the characters they were playing, Actors Studio performers were well suited to become Hollywood stars. ... In brusk, Lee Strasberg transformed a socialistic, egalitarian theory of acting into a celebrity-making car. ... Information technology does not affair 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 3 performers revealed new kinds of trunk linguistic communication 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 before film actors, they enacted emotionally wounded and vulnerable outsiders struggling for cocky-agreement, 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 than vivid inner life.^[36]

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 than.^[37]

Strasberg, his married woman Paula, his girl 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 1 that "can by no means be dismissed as a simple deed of character assassination." Brustein, a critic, director, and producer, had previously made public his dislike of the method every bit a philosophy of acting. The play was produced by Brustein'south American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was later presented in Singapore.^[38]

In 2020 Google Arts & Culture, together with Giovanni Morassutti, an Italian actor who has deepened the study of The Method and long-time collaborator of John Strasberg, have created an online exhibition named Strasberg Legacy tracing the history of the realistic schoolhouse of acting.^[39]

Broadway credits [edit]

Note: All works are plays and the original productions, unless otherwise noted.

• 4 Walls (1927) – actor
• The Vegetable (1929) – director
• Scarlet Rust (1929) – histrion
• Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) – role player
• The Business firm of Connelly (1931) – codirector
• 1931 (1931) – director
• Success Story (1932) – managing director
• Men in White (1933) – director
• Gentlewoman (1934) – director
• Gold Hawkeye Guy (1934) – director
• Paradise Lost (1935) – produced by Group Theatre
• Instance of Clyde Griffiths (1936) – manager, produced past Group Theatre
• Johnny Johnson (1936) – director, produced by Grouping Theatre
• Many Mansions (1937) – director
• Aureate Boy (1937) – produced by Group Theatre
• Roosty (1938) – Director* Casey Jones (1938), produced by Group Theatre
• All the Living (1938) – managing director
• Dance Night (1938) – director
• Rocket exhibitionn (1938) – produced by Grouping Theatre
• The Gentle People (1939) – produced past Group Theatre
• Awake and Sing! (1939), revival – produced by Group Theatre
• Summertime Night (1939) – director
• Night Music (1940) – produced by Group Theatre
• The 5th Column (1940) – director
• Clash by Nighttime (1941) – director
• A Kiss for Cinderella (1942), revival – manager
• R.U.R. (Rossum'southward Universal Robots) (1942), revival – director
• Amends (1943) – producer and managing director
• South Pacific (1943, evidently no relation to the Broadway musical Due south Pacific) – manager
• Skipper Adjacent to God (1948) – manager
• The Big Knife (1949) – director
• The Endmost Door (1949) – manager
• The State 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) – manager, produced by the Actors Studio

Moving-picture show credits [edit]

• Parnell (1937) as Pat (uncredited)^{[ dubious – hash out ]}
• China Venture (1953) as Patterson^{[ citation needed ]}
• The Godfather Function Ii (1974; nominated, Academy Laurels All-time Role player in a Supporting Role) every bit Hyman Roth^[40]
• The Cassandra Crossing (1977) as Herman Kaplan^[40]
• The Terminal Tenant (1978, Television receiver flick).^{[40] [41]}
• ...And Justice for All. (1979) equally Sam Kirkland^[40]
• Boardwalk (1979) equally David Rosen^[40]
• Going in Fashion (1979) every bit Willie^[41]
• Skokie (1981, TV film) every bit Morton Weisman^[41]

Encounter likewise [edit]

• Ion Cojar
• Stanislavski's organisation
• Method interim
• Constantin Stanislavski
• Ivana Chubbuck
• Marilyn Monroe
• Michael Chekhov
• Notable alumni of the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Moving-picture show Establish
• Sanford Meisner
• Stella Adler

References [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f one thousand h i j k} Gussow, Mel. "Lee Strasberg of Actors Studio Is Dead". New York Times, February 18, 1982.
2. ^ "Lee Strasberg". IMDb . Retrieved 2018-12-sixteen .
3. ^ "Lee Strasberg". Oxford Reference . Retrieved 2018-10-06 .
4. ^ Corrigan, Robert Willoughby (1 January 1979). The world of the theatre. Scott, Foresman and Company. ISBN9780673151070 . Retrieved 15 March 2017 – via Google Books.
5. ^ "Burt Lancaster". The New York Times . Retrieved fifteen March 2017.
6. ^ ^{a b c d due east} Lipton, James. Within Inside, Dutton, (2007) p. 14, other names listed
7. ^ ^{a b} LSTFI website
8. ^ "Admissions". Lee Strasberg Theatre and Motion-picture show Institute . Retrieved 2018-10-06 .
9. ^ ^{a b} Bast, W. Surviving James Dean, Barricade Books (2006)
10. ^ "Sidney Lumet". Encyclopedia of World Biography, (2004)
11. ^ ^{a b c} Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life, Da Capo Press (1997)
12. ^ Lumet, Sidney, and Rapf, Joanna E. Sidney Lumet: Interviews, University of Mississippi Press, (2006)
13. ^ Tugend, Tom (November 23, 2000). "A Century of Strasberg". The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles . Retrieved May 27, 2018.
14. ^ Carnicke, Sharon. Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-start Century New York: Routledge, 1988. ISBN 0-203-88209-1. p. 45
15. ^ ^{a b} Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: A Biography, HarperCollins (2005)
16. ^ Slater, Robert and Elinor. Great Jewish Men, Jonathan David Company, Inc. (1996)
17. ^ ^{a b} The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography, Houghton Mifflin Reference Books, (2003)
18. ^ Buford, Kate. Burt Lancaster: An American Life, DaCapo Press (2001)
19. ^ Smith, Wendy. Existent Life Drama, Grove Press (1994)
20. ^ Images of America, Trumbull Historical Society, 1997, p. 123
21. ^ The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, Don Wilmeth, p. 21
22. ^ Smith, p. 302
23. ^ Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness, Da Capo Publ. (1984)
24. ^ Pacino, Al, and Grobel, Lawrence. Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel, Simon and Schuster (2006)
25. ^ Staggs, Sam. "When Blanche Met Brando: the Scandalous Story of A Streetcar Named Desire," Macmillan (2005), p. 88
26. ^ Brando, Marlon. Songs My Mother Taught Me, Random Business firm (1994)
27. ^ Zolotow, Maurice. Billy Wilder in Hollywood, Hal Leonard Corp. (1987)
28. ^ "The Consummate Idiot's Guide to Screenwriting" Alpha Books, (2004), p. 56
29. ^ Foster, Arnold W., and Blau, Judith R. Art and Social club: Readings in the Sociology of the Arts, State University of New York Press (1989), pp. 118–19
30. ^ Butler, Jeremy G. Star Texts: Paradigm and Performance in Film and Television, Wayne Country University Press. (1991) p. 46
31. ^ Marilyn Monroe - Eulogy on YouTube
32. ^ Marilyn Monroe's funeral on YouTube
33. ^ "Lee Strasberg, 'Method' Acting Mentor, Dies at fourscore", Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1982
34. ^ Burstyn, Ellen. Lessons in Becoming Myself, Riverhead Books (2007)
35. ^ Wojcik, Pamela. Movie Acting, the Moving picture Reader: The Film Reader, Routledge (2004)
36. ^ ^{a b} Wojcik, op cit.
37. ^ "Lee Strasberg papers headed to Library of Congress", Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2012
38. ^ Marks, Peter. "Noboy Dies on Friday", The New York Times (Apr 30, 1998)
39. ^ "Strasberg Legacy: mostra online di Google Arts & Civilization". Ecodelcinema (in Italian). 2020-10-07. Retrieved 2021-12-xviii .
40. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Lee Strasberg". BFI . Retrieved 2022-03-30 .
41. ^ ^{a b c} "Lee Strasberg". TVGuide.com . Retrieved 2022-03-31 .

External links [edit]

• The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Pic Institute
• Strasberg video lectures
• Lee Strasberg at IMDb
• Lee Strasberg at the Internet Broadway Database
• Lee Strasberg at Rotten Tomatoes
• John Strasberg Studios
• Lee Strasberg at Find a Grave
• Audio Interview with Lee Strasberg on WGBH

Media offices
Preceded by	Artistic Director of the Actors Studio 1951–1982	Succeeded by Al Pacino Ellen Burstyn

dodgshunalogethe.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strasberg

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