Stella Adler (February 10, 1901 – December 21, 1992) was an American actress and acting teacher.
113-689: A member of Yiddish Theater's Adler dynasty, Adler began acting at a young age. She shifted to producing, directing, and teaching, founding the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949. Later in life she taught part time in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her protégée, actress Joanne Linville , who continued to teach Adler's technique. Stella Adler was born in Manhattan's Lower East Side in New York City. She
226-609: A Russian language county school, pulled out of school entirely, or have a private tutor for a few months. He wrote that "the sum of my learning was a little arithmetic, some Russian grammar, and a few French phrases." He grew up with both Jewish and Christian playmates, but also survived one of the Odessa pogroms around 1862. He played hooky; as a 12-year-old he started going to witness public floggings, brandings, and executions of criminals; later he would develop more of an interest in attending courtroom trials. At 14 he began working in
339-538: A Trotskyist intellectual, slightly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin with his cane and bowler hat. As he died, the audience heard The Internationale sung. Piscator founded the influential (though short-lived) Piscator-Bühne in Berlin in 1927. In 1928 he produced a notable adaptation of the unfinished, episodic Czech comic novel The Good Soldier Schweik . The dramaturgical collective that produced this adaptation included Bertolt Brecht. Brecht later described it as
452-466: A monumental sculpture by Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi was dedicated to Piscator in central London. In the fall of 1985, an annual Erwin Piscator Award was inaugurated in New York City, the adopted home of Piscator's widow Maria Ley. Additionally, a Piscator Prize of Honors has been annually awarded to generous patrons of art and culture in commemoration of Maria Ley since 1996. The host of
565-552: A sanitar , an assistant in the Red Cross Medical Corps. He was selected (apparently on little more than his appearance) by Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshersky to work at a German hospital in Bender , Moldova , dealing mainly with typhus patients. In his four months there, he became a favorite with the established Jewish families there, and earned a Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement for his brief service to
678-426: A signaller ). The experience inspired a hatred of militarism and war that lasted for the rest of his life. He wrote a few bitter poems that were published in 1915 and 1916 in the left-wing Expressionist literary magazine Die Aktion . In summer 1917, having participated in the battles at Ypres Salient and been in hospital once, he was assigned to a newly established army theatre unit. In November 1918, when
791-466: A " montage from the novel". Leo Lania 's play Konjunktur (Oil Boom) premiered in Berlin in 1928, directed by Erwin Piscator, with incidental music by Kurt Weill . Three oil companies fight over the rights to oil production in a primitive Balkan country, and in the process exploit the people and destroy the environment. Weill's songs from this play, such as Die Muschel von Margate , are still part of
904-572: A Brody singer, like Grodner, except "I had no voice". This lack of a singing voice would be a major factor in the direction of his acting career: according to Rosenfeld, although Yiddish theater was long dominated by vaudevilles and operettas , "He was the only Yiddish actor to rely entirely on classics and translations of modern European plays." The outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War brought on universal conscription of young men. At his family's urging, Adler bribed his way into becoming
1017-407: A child full of innocence and vulnerability." In the book Acting: Onstage and Off , Robert Barton wrote: "[Adler] established the value of the actor putting herself in the place of the character rather than vice versa ... More than anyone else, Stella Adler brought into public awareness all the close careful attention to text and analysis Stanislavski endorsed." In 1991, Stella Adler was inducted into
1130-496: A dime and tell her to call her mother to pick her up because "she had no business in the theater." On another occasion, Ian relates, Adler forcibly ripped a dress off another actress's body to get the actress to play a scene a different way. Adler was related to Jerry Adler , an actor and theatre director. Adler married three times: first to Horace Eliascheff—the father of her only child, Ellen—from 1923 to 1930; then from 1942 until 1959 to director and critic Harold Clurman , one of
1243-708: A fame well out of proportion to the meagre money. Many of the most prominent figures in Yiddish theater, including Sigmund Mogulesko , David Kessler , Abba and Clara Shoengold , and Sara Heine (the future Sara Adler), gave guest performances when they passed through London. One of Adler's roles from this period was as the villain Franz Moore in Herman Fiedler's adaptation of Schiller 's The Robbers , which introduced Schiller into Yiddish theater. On at least one occasion in 1886, he played both Franz Moore and
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#17327906501531356-530: A labor dispute with the Hebrew Actors' Union ; he played that season in London rather than New York. A stroke in 1920 while vacationing in upstate New York nearly ended his acting career, although he continued to appear occasionally, usually as part of a benefit performance for himself, often playing Act I of The Yiddish King Lear : the title character remains seated throughout the entire act. In 1924, he
1469-473: A late second zenith. From 1962 on, Piscator produced several works that dealt with trying to come to terms with the Germans' Nazi past and other timely issues; he inspired mnemonic and documentary theatre in those years until his death. Piscator's stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy 's novel War and Peace has been produced in some 16 countries since 1955, including three productions in New York City. In 1980,
1582-636: A leave of absence from his job to travel with Rosenberg's troupe to Kherson , where he made a successful acting debut as the lover Marcus in The Witch of Botoşani . He overstayed his leave, lost his government post, and the decision to become a full-time actor was effectively made for him. Adler was unhappy that under Tulya Goldfaden there were "No more communistic shares, no more idealistic comradeship". Still, under this same Goldfaden regime he had his first taste of real stardom when people in Chişinău camped in
1695-509: A living as a journalist at the Arbeiter Zeitung , precursor to The Forward . Gordin's first two plays, Siberia and Two Worlds were commercial failures—so much so that Mogulesko and Kessler quit the company—but The Yiddish King Lear , starring Adler and his new wife Sara was such a success that the play eventually transferred to Finkel's larger National Theater. This play (based only very loosely on Shakespeare) played well with
1808-711: A new level and allowing a modest professionalism, though never at much more than a poverty wage. Adler's memoir acknowledges many people who helped him out in various ways. Eventually, with the aid in particular of Sonya's relative Herman Fiedler—a playwright, orchestra leader, and stage manager—the Adlers and the Grodners were able to take over the Prescott Street Club. There they presented generally serious theater to audiences of about 150. Fiedler adapted The Odessa Beggar from Felix Pyat 's The Ragpicker of Paris ,
1921-616: A new studio in Los Angeles named the Art of Acting Studio in 2010 and is run by the Adler family. All works are the original Broadway productions unless otherwise noted. Jacob Pavlovich Adler Jacob Pavlovich Adler ( Yiddish : יעקבֿ פּאַװלאָװיטש אַדלער; born Yankev P. Adler ; February 12, 1855 – April 1, 1926) was a Jewish actor and star of Yiddish theater , first in Odessa , and later in London and in New York City's Yiddish Theater District . Nicknamed " nesher hagodol ", ("
2034-454: A personable con-man, and Jacob Spivakofsky , scion of a wealthy Jewish family—had become actors there, then had left Goldfaden to found their own company, touring in Moldavia . Adler wrote them to urge them to bring their troupe to Odessa. Adler managed to leverage a recommendation from Prince Meshersky and another from Avrom Markovich Brodsky —a businessman so successful as to have earned
2147-466: A play "about Pope Pius XII and the allegedly neglected rescue of Italian Jews from Nazi gas chambers." Until his death in 1966, Piscator was a major exponent of contemporary and documentary theatre . Piscator's wife, Maria Ley, died in New York City in 1999. Piscator's contribution to theatre has been described by theatre historian Günther Rühle as "the boldest advance made by the German stage" during
2260-425: A result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated. In 1988, she published The Technique of Acting with a foreword by Marlon Brando. From 1926 until 1952, she appeared regularly on Broadway . Her later stage roles include the 1946 revival of He Who Gets Slapped and an eccentric mother in the 1961 black comedy Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in
2373-460: A scene; another favorite phrase of hers regarding this was "don't be boring". Singer-songwriter Janis Ian studied under Adler in the early 1980s to help her feel more comfortable on stage, and the two women remained close friends until Adler's death. In her autobiography Society's Child (2008), Ian recalled that Adler had little patience for students who weren't progressing as she wanted, going so far on one occasion as to give one of her students
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#17327906501532486-472: A series of other locations, notably Paris, but eventually came back to London, where Israel Grodner died in 1887. By November 1885, Adler had a theatrical club of his own, the Princes Street Club, No. 3 Princes Street (now Princelet Street, E1), purpose-built, financed by a butcher named David Smith. It seated 300; playing every night except Friday, he was earning about £3 s.10 a week, but with
2599-518: A similar situation for himself, he returned to London, drawn back to the charms of both Dinah and Jennya. He did not remain long in London. After some major successes in Warsaw , which was under Austrian rule, he returned to London in the spring of 1889, and then again to New York, this time to play for Heine at Poole's Theater. After an initial failure in The Odessa Beggar (he writes that
2712-456: A son) to marry Adler's father. The marriage to a divorcée cost Feivel Adler (and therefore Jacob Adler) his status as a Kohen (priest). His paternal grandfather lived with them for some eight years; he was a pious man, and the family was much more observant of Jewish religious practices during the time he lived with them. However, according to Adler, the real patriarch of the family was his wealthy uncle Aaron "Arke" Trachtenberg, who would later be
2825-466: A specific content (the specific content, the specific message determines the means and not vice versa!) has by now become largely obscured. So we are still standing at the starting blocks. The race is not yet on ... In 1931, after the collapse of the third Piscator-Bühne, Piscator went to Moscow in order to make the motion picture Revolt of the Fishermen with actor Aleksei Dikiy , for Mezhrabpom ,
2938-472: A tavern, or a party every night. He would later draw on his own life at this time for his portrayal of Protosov in Tolstoy 's The Living Corpse . Over the next few years he had numerous love affairs, and was prevented from a love marriage with one Esther Raizel because his own dubious reputation compounded the taint of his mother's divorce. He survived another pogrom, but his family was financially ruined by
3051-466: A textile factory, and soon rose to a white collar job there at a salary of 10 rubles a month, which would have been decent even for an adult. Still living at home, he began to frequent the disreputable district of Moldovanka . His first brush with stardom was that he briefly became a boxer , known as Yankele Kulachnik , "Jake the Fist". He soon got bored with boxing, but not with his new connections to
3164-762: A tragicomic play written on the eve of the Revolutions of 1848 . Adler starred in it, in a role he would continue to play throughout his career. Two months later, he played Uriel Acosta at the Holborn Theatre to an audience of 500, including the "Jewish aristocrats of the West End ". The piety of the London Jews was such that they had to use an (unplayable) cardboard ram's horn so as to avoid blasphemy . Chief Rabbi Adler and his son and eventual successor Hermann Adler were present, and both, especially
3277-738: A troupe of his own with Keni Liptzin, and brought Rosenberg in as a partner. This troupe toured to Rostov , Taganrog , around Lithuania , to Dünaburg (now Daugavpils , Latvia ). Aiming to bring the troupe to Saint Petersburg, they brought back their sometime manager Chaikel Bain. They were in Riga in August 1883 when the news arrived that a total ban was about to be placed on Yiddish theater in Russia. The troupe were left stranded in Riga. Chaikel Bain took ill and died. With some difficulty, passage to London for
3390-619: Is a character in Names , Mark Kemble's play about former Group Theatre members' struggles with the House Un-American Activities Committee . Kemble consulted her about characterizations for the play and she told him to "just make it up". Irene Gilbert , a longtime protégée and friend, ran the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in Los Angeles until her death. The Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York opened
3503-491: Is required to play a variety of roles already instilled inside them, and that extensive research was needed to understand the experiences of characters who have different values originating from different cultures. Like Stanislavski, Adler understood the "gold hidden" inside the circumstances of the text. Actors should stimulate emotional experience by imagining the scene's "given circumstances," rather than recalling experiences from their own lives. She also understood that 50% of
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3616-510: Is the Shylock I have tried to show." After his two Broadway triumphs, Adler returned to Yiddish theater. In the wake of the Kishinev pogrom , Adler went back briefly to Eastern Europe in summer 1903, where he tried to convince various family members to come to America. Although he was greeted as a hero, he was only partially successful in convincing people to leave; his mother, in particular,
3729-448: The 1952 presidential election . On December 21, 1992, Adler died from heart failure at the age of 91 in Los Angeles. Adler's technique, based on a balanced and pragmatic combination of imagination and memory, is hugely credited with introducing the subtle and insightful details and a deep physical embodiment of a character. Elaine Stritch once said: "What an extraordinary combination was Stella Adler—a goddess full of magic and mystery,
3842-608: The American Theater Hall of Fame . In 2004, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired Adler's complete archive along with a small collection of her papers from her former husband Harold Clurman . The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, lecture notes, photographs, and other materials. Over 1,100 audio and video recordings of Adler teaching from
3955-523: The American Theater Hall of Fame . Stella was a famous actress and theatre teacher. Erwin Piscator Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator (17 December 1893 – 30 March 1966) was a German theatre director and producer . Along with Bertolt Brecht , he was the foremost exponent of epic theatre , a form that emphasizes the socio-political content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of
4068-625: The Moscow Art Theater — Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya . In 1931, with Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan , among others, she joined the Group Theatre , New York, founded by Harold Clurman , Lee Strasberg , and Cheryl Crawford , through theater director and critic, Clurman, whom she later married in 1943. With Group Theatre, she worked in plays such as Success Story by John Howard Lawson, two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost , and directed
4181-626: The Romanian Opera House nor Maurice Heine at the Oriental Theater had any use for them. They headed on to Chicago, where, after a brief initial success, the troupe fell apart due to a combination of labor disputes and cutthroat competition. The Oberlanders managed to start a restaurant; he and Keni Liptzin headed to New York that autumn, where she managed to sign on at the Romanian Opera House; failing to find
4294-590: The Volksbühne (1924–1927), and later as managing director at his own theatre (the Piscator-Bühne on Nollendorfplatz ), Piscator produced social and political plays especially suited to his theories. His dramatic aims were utilitarian — to influence voters or clarify left-wing policies. He used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences. In 1926, his updated production of Friedrich Schiller 's The Robbers at
4407-598: The armistice was declared, Piscator participated in the November Revolution , giving a speech in Hasselt at the first meeting of a revolutionary Soldiers' Council ( Soviet ). Piscator returned to Berlin and joined the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He left briefly for Königsberg , where he joined the Tribunal Theatre. He participated in several expressionist plays and played
4520-482: The "childhood" of his career. He describes his thoughts toward the end of this period, "For three years I had wandered in the cave of the Witch in the clown's rags of Shmendrick and what did I really know of my trade?... If someday I return to the Yiddish theater, let me at least not be so ignorant." Returning to Odesa, he discovered that no one would employ him in any job other than as an actor. In 1882, he put together
4633-429: The "sons of rich fathers, attorneys without diplomas", etc. A good dancer, he became part of a crowd of young toughs who regularly crashed wedding parties. His local celebrity continued, with a reputation as Odessa's best can-can dancer. He left the factory, becoming a raznoschik , a peddler; his memoir hints at back-door assignations with "servant girls and chambermaids"; by his own description, his life at this point
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4746-800: The 1960s to the 1980s have been digitized by the center and are accessible on site. The archive traces her career from her start in the New York Yiddish Theater District to her encounters with Stanislavski and the Group Theatre to her lectures at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. In 2006, she was honored with a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of the Stella Adler Theatre at 6773 Hollywood Boulevard. Adler
4859-530: The 20th century. Piscator's theatre techniques of the 1920s — such as the extensive use of still and cinematic projections from 1925 on, as well as complex scaffold stages — had an extensive influence on European and American production methods. His dramaturgy of contrasts led to sharp political satirical effects and anticipated the commentary techniques of epic theatre. In the Federal Republic of Germany, Piscator's interventionist theatre model enjoyed
4972-469: The Adlers were among the few players to remain with Rosenberg to form a new one that included the actress who later became famous under the name of Keni Liptzin . In Chernihiv , Adler turned down the opportunity to act in a Russian-language production of Boris Gudonov . Around this time Goldfaden appeared again and, after using an elaborate intrigue to demonstrate to the Adlers that Rosenberg had no loyalty to them, recruited them to his own troupe, which at
5085-594: The Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad . Among the plays she directed was a 1956 revival of the Paul Green/Kurt Weill antiwar musical Johnny Johnson . She appeared in only three films: Love on Toast (1937), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), and My Girl Tisa (1948). She concluded her acting career in 1961, after 55 years. During that time, and for years after, she became a renowned acting teacher. Adler
5198-687: The Great Eagle ", Adler being the German for "eagle"), he achieved his first theatrical success in Odessa, but his career there was rapidly cut short when Yiddish theater was banned in Russia in 1883. He became a star in Yiddish theater in London, and in 1889, on his second voyage to the United States, he settled in New York City. Adler soon started a company of his own, ushering in a new, more serious Yiddish theater, most notably by recruiting
5311-547: The New York audience of the time was not ready for "tragicomedy"), he was a success in the melodrama Moishele Soldat , and "a more worthy success" in Uriel Acosta . This gave him the basis to bring Dinah to America. Their marriage didn't last, though the divorce was amicable: she remarried, to Siegmund Feinman. Adler fell out with Heine, initially over business; at this time Heine's marriage was also falling apart, and Sara Heine would eventually become Sara Adler. Adler went on
5424-666: The Piscator House. After World War II and the break-up of Germany, Piscator returned to West Germany in 1951 due to McCarthy era political pressure in the United States against former communists in the arts. In 1962 Piscator was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbühne in West Berlin . To much international critical acclaim, in February 1963 Piscator premièred Rolf Hochhuth 's The Deputy ,
5537-630: The Second Destruction of the Temple , and Hymie in America . Adler was not content to continue long in this mode, and sought a playwright who could create pieces that would appeal to the Jewish public, while still providing a type of theater he could be proud to perform. He recruited Jacob Gordin , already a well-respected novelist and intellectual, recently arrived in New York and eking out
5650-820: The Soviet film company associated with the International Workers' Relief Organisation. As John Willett wrote, throughout the pre-Hitler years Piscator's "commitment to the Russian Revolution was a decisive factor in all his work." With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Piscator's stay in the Soviet Union became exile. In July 1936, Piscator left the Soviet Union for France . In 1937, he married dancer Maria Ley in Paris. Bertolt Brecht
5763-475: The Tsar. Returning to Odessa, he got a job distributing newspapers. This respectable work required getting up at 6 a.m., not good for a carouser. Still, newspaper connection meant that he soon heard of one of the war's other effects: the many Jewish merchants and middlemen war brought to Bucharest were a boon to Abraham Goldfaden 's nascent Yiddish theater there. Two of his Odessa acquaintances— Israel Rosenberg ,
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#17327906501535876-427: The United States, which was taken up instead by Mogulesko and Finkel. In winter 1887, an audience at the Princes Street Club panicked when they thought a simulated stage fire was real; 17 people died in the stampede. While the authorities determined that this was not Adler's fault, and the club was allowed to reopen, the crowds did not return; "the theater," he writes, "was so cold, dark, and empty you could hunt wolves in
5989-726: The Yiddish stage at the People's Theater, he played the role again in a 1903 Broadway production, directed by Arthur Hopkins . In this production, Adler spoke his lines in Yiddish while the rest of the cast spoke in English. The New York Times review of Adler's performance was not favorable: in particular his naturalistic acting style was not what audiences of the period expected in a production of Shakespeare. Some other reviews (such as that in Theater magazine) were friendlier; in any event
6102-404: The Yiddish theater's first realistic playwright, Jacob Gordin . Adler scored a great triumph in the title role of Gordin's Der Yiddisher King Lear ( The Jewish King Lear ), set in 19th-century Russia, which along with his portrayal of Shakespeare 's Shylock would form the core of the persona he defined as the "Grand Jew". Nearly all his family went into theater; probably the most famous
6215-417: The actor should create by imagination rather than memory. Upon her return, she broke away from Strasberg on the fundamental aspects of method acting. In 1982, the day Strasberg died, Adler is said to have remarked, "It will take the theatre decades to recover from the damage that Lee Strasberg inflicted on American actors." In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood. There, she acted in films for six years under
6328-470: The actor's job is internal (imagination, emotion, action, will) and 50% is externals (characterization, way of walking, voice, face). To find what works for the character, the actors must study the circumstances of the text and make their choices based on what one gets from the material. For instance, if a character talks about horse riding, one needs to know something about horse riding as an actor, otherwise one will be faking. More importantly, one must study
6441-613: The age of 18, as Naomi in Elisa Ben Avia with her father's company, in which she appeared for a year before returning to New York. In London, she met her first husband, Englishman Horace Eliashcheff; their brief marriage, however, ended in a divorce. Adler made her English-language debut on Broadway in 1922 as the Butterfly in The World We Live In , and she spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922–23,
6554-525: The audience or the production's formal beauty . Erwin Friedrich Max Piscator was born on 17 December 1893 in the small Prussian village of Greifenstein-Ulm , the son of Carl Piscator, a merchant, and his wife Antonia Laparose. His family was descended from Johannes Piscator , a Protestant theologian who produced an important translation of the Bible in 1600. The family moved to
6667-542: The autumn of 1914, in small unpaid roles at the Munich Court Theatre , under the directorship of Ernst von Possart . In 1896, Karl Lautenschläger had installed one of the world's first revolving stages in that theatre. During the First World War , Piscator was drafted into the German army , serving in a frontline infantry unit as a Landsturm soldier from the spring of 1915 (and later as
6780-429: The basic facts of epic, i.e. political theatre", which at that time "was still meeting with widespread rejection and misapprehension." Three decades later, Piscator said that: The justification for epic techniques is no longer disputed by anyone, but there is considerable confusion about what should be expressed by these means. The functional character of these epic techniques, in other words their inseparability from
6893-575: The collapse of their company were mitigated by a series of three benefit performances, in coordination with the local Russian-language theater company. Sonya returned to Odessa to give birth to their daughter Rivka; Adler stayed on six weeks in Zhytomyr and had sort of a belated apprenticeship with two Russian character actors of national fame, Borisov and Philipovsky. However, he returned to Odesa thinking that he would most likely leave theater behind. Late in life, when he looked back at his years acting in Adler and Goldfaden's companies, Adler saw it as merely
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#17327906501537006-509: The corner of Bowery and Canal Street , the first purpose-built Yiddish theater in New York. His wife Sara had branched out to do her own plays at the Novelty Theater in Brooklyn, and the family had taken up residence in a four-story brownstone, with an elevator, in the East Seventies. (They would later move one more time, to Riverside Drive .) Around this time Lincoln Steffens wrote a piece saying that Yiddish theater in New York had eclipsed English-language theater in quality. This golden age
7119-505: The courtyards awaiting performances. Even the police seemed to have "fallen in love" with the troupe, dressing up the actors in their uniforms at riotous parties after shows, while trying on the troupe's costumes themselves. Unsatisfied with the low pay, in Kremenchuk Adler led an unsuccessful actors' strike. A series of intrigues almost led to a breakup with Sonya, but ultimately led both back into Rosenberg's troupe and led to their marriage in Poltava . When this particular troupe broke up,
7232-472: The destruction of their possessions and the theft of their money. In writing about this period in his memoir, Adler mentions attending and admiring performances by Israel Grodner , a Brody singer and improvisational actor who would soon become one of the founders of professional Yiddish theater. A song of Grodner's about an old father turned away by his children would later be the germ of the idea for The Yiddish King Lear . He writes that he would have become
7345-444: The distinguished Preußisches Staatstheater in Berlin provoked widespread controversy. Piscator made extensive cuts to the text and reinterpreted the play as a vehicle for his political beliefs. He presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a substantially self-absorbed insurgent. As Moor's foil, Piscator made the character of Spiegelberg, often presented as a sinister figure, the voice of the working-class revolution. Spiegelberg appeared as
7458-484: The end of the war had meant the collapse of Yiddish theater in the provinces, and ready to start a troupe in Odessa. Adler aspired to be an actor, but found himself at first serving the troupe more as critic and theoretician, making use of his now-vast knowledge of Russian theater. The first productions (Goldfaden's Grandmother and Granddaughter and Shmendrick ) were popular successes, but Adler's own account suggests that they were basically mediocre, and his Uncle Arke
7571-406: The first of a series of roles through which he developed a persona he would later call "the Grand Jew". After Łódź, they landed in Zhytomyr , under an incompetent investor/director named Hartenstein. They thought they had found "a quiet corner" of the Russian Empire in which "to make a bit of a livelihood", but in fact Hartenstein was simply running through his money. The financial consequences of
7684-444: The founders of the Group Theatre. She was finally married to physicist and novelist Mitchell A. Wilson , from 1966 until his death in 1973. From 1938 to 1946, she was sister-in-law to actress Sylvia Sidney . Sidney was married Luther Adler at the time and provided Stella with a nephew. Even after Sidney and Luther divorced, she and Sylvia remained close friends. A lifelong Democrat , she supported Adlai Stevenson 's campaign during
7797-446: The gallery." Adler's affair with Jennya continued; he also took up with a young chorus girl from an Orthodox Jewish family, Dinah Shtettin . His memoir is extremely unclear on the sequence of events, and hints at other affairs at this time. The memoir does make clear that the "hot-blooded" Jennya had little interest in a marriage, while Dinah's father insisted on a marriage, even though he despised Alder and made it clear that he doubted
7910-415: The insult and humiliation he has suffered at his hands. This is why he goes so far as to bring his knife and scales into the court. For Shylock, however, the desired climax was to refuse the pound of flesh with a gesture of divine compassion. When the verdict goes against him, he is crushed because he has been robbed of this opportunity, not because he lusts for Antonio's death. This was my interpretation. This
8023-635: The late 19th century to the 1950s. Adler became the most famous and influential member of her family. She began acting at the age of four as a part of the Independent Yiddish Art Company of her parents. Adler began her acting career at the age of four in the play Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre on the Lower East Side, as a part of her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company. She grew up acting alongside her parents, often playing roles of boys and girls. Her work schedule allowed little time for schooling, but when possible, she studied at public schools and New York University . She made her London debut, at
8136-512: The marriage would last. With the aid of a small sum of money from his distant relative the Chief Rabbi, Adler got together the money to travel by steerage to New York, with his infant son Abrom, Alexander Oberlander and his family, Keni and Volodya Liptzin, and Herman Fiedler, among others. Adler did not doubt that the rabbi was glad to see Yiddish actors leaving London. In New York, they promptly discovered that neither Mogulesko and Finkel at
8249-454: The model for his portrayal of roles such as Gordin's Jewish King Lear. Adler grew up with one foot in a traditional Jewish world and one in a more modern, European one. His granddaughter Lulla Rosenfeld writes, "Of the haskala [Jewish Enlightenment] as an organized system of ideas, he probably knew little or nothing." His education was irregular: as the family fortunes rose and fell, he would be sent to cheder (Jewish religious school) or to
8362-442: The modern repertoire of art music. In 1929 Piscator published his The Political Theatre , discussions of the theory of theatre . In the preface to its 1963 edition, Piscator wrote that the book was "assembled in hectic sessions during rehearsals for The Merchant of Berlin " by Walter Mehring , which had opened on 6 September 1929 at the second Piscator-Bühne. It was intended to provide "a definitive explanation and elucidation of
8475-769: The most serious Yiddish-language theater New York had yet seen in the Yiddish Theater District , with plays such as Scribe's La Juive , Zolotkev's Samson the Great , and Sinckievich's Quo Vadis . However, after Thomashefsky became an enormous popular success in Moses Halevy Horowitz's operetta David ben Jesse at Moishe Finkel's National Theater, the Union Theater temporarily to abandon its highbrow programming and competed head on, with operettas Judith and Holofernes , Titus Andronicus, or
8588-757: The name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theater until it dissolved in 1941. Eventually, she returned to New York to act, direct, and teach, the latter first at Erwin Piscator 's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research , New York City, before founding Stella Adler Conservatory of Theatre in 1949. In the following years, she taught Marlon Brando , Steve McQueen , Dolores del Río , Robert De Niro , Elaine Stritch , Martin Sheen , Manu Tupou , Harvey Keitel , Melanie Griffith , Peter Bogdanovich , and Warren Beatty , among others,
8701-524: The nickname "the Jewish Tsar"—to get a job as a marketplace inspector for the Department of Weights and Measures, rather unusual for a Jew at that time. His mildly corrupt tenure there gave him good contacts with the police. These would soon come in handy for smoothing over certain problems of a young and unlicensed theater troupe when Rosenberg and Spivakofsky returned from Romania, penniless because
8814-410: The other, until his 50s, he was not hesitant to take advantage of his prowess as a dancer, and even occasionally took on roles that called for some singing, although by all accounts (including his own) this was not his forte. Adler wrote in his memoir that the passion of his future wife Sonya Oberlander (and of her family) for theater, and their vision of what Yiddish theater could become, kept him in
8927-420: The physical and vocal aspects of acting was necessary for the actor to command the stage, and that all body language should be carefully crafted and voices need to be clear and expressive. She often referred to this as an actor's "size" or "worthiness of the stage". Her biggest mantra was perhaps "in your choices lies your talent", and she encouraged actors to find the most grand character interpretation possible in
9040-405: The play's hero, Franz's brother Karl Moore: in the play they never meet. In 1886, Adler's daughter Rivka died of croup ; Sonya died of an infection contracted while giving birth to their son Abram; meanwhile, he had been carrying on an affair with a young woman, Jenny ("Jennya") Kaiser, who was also pregnant, with his son Charles. Depressed after Sonya's death, he passed up an offer to relocate to
9153-608: The popular audience, but also with Jewish intellectuals who until this time had largely ignored Yiddish Theater, ending for a time the commercial dominance of operettas such as those of Horowitz and Joseph Lateiner . The next year, Gordin's The Wild Man solidified this change in the direction of Yiddish theater. Over the next decades, Adler would play in (or, in some cases, merely produce) numerous plays by Gordin, but also classics by Shakespeare, Schiller, Lessing ; Eugène Scribe 's La Juive ; dramatizations of George du Maurier 's Trilby and Alexandre Dumas, fils ' Camille ; and
9266-706: The principles of characterization and script analysis. She also taught at the New School, and the Yale School of Drama . For many years, Adler led the undergraduate drama department at New York University, and became one of America's leading acting teachers. Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information—how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As
9379-470: The profession despite his uncle's view. When she was cast by Rosenberg opposite Jacob Spivakovsky in the title role of Abraham Goldfaden 's darkly comic operetta Breindele Cossack , she pulled strings so that the role of Guberman would be reassigned to Adler. His success in the role was cut short by the news that Goldfaden, whose plays they were using without permission, was coming with his troupe to Odesa . Goldfaden's own account says he came there at
9492-624: The rabbi's desires than to assist Yiddish-language theater. Nathan Marcus Adler viewed Yiddish as a "jargon" that existed at the expense of both liturgical Hebrew and the English necessary for upward mobility, and his Orthodox Judaism "could not endure so much as a blessing given on stage, for such a blessing would be given in vain "; further, he was afraid that the portrayals of Jews on stage would give aid and comfort to their enemies. At this time, Yiddish theater in London meant amateur clubs. The arrival of professional Yiddish actors from Russia worked great changes, bringing Yiddish theater in London to
9605-567: The renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only U.S. tour with his Moscow Art Theatre . Adler and many others saw these performances, which had a powerful and lasting impact on her career and the 20th-century American theatre. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925; there, she was introduced to Stanislavski's theories, from founders and Russian actor-teachers and former members of
9718-592: The road with Boris Thomashefsky , who at the time was pioneering the touring circuit for Yiddish theater in America. They played in Philadelphia and Chicago, where word arrived of an opportunity to take over Poole's, Heine having moved on to the Thalia. Adler returned to New York, where he managed also to win Mogulesko and Kessler away from Heine. Renaming Poole's as the Union Theater, Adler attempted to produce
9831-528: The same production was revived two years later. Lulla Rosenfeld writes that Henry Irving , the great Shylock before that time, played Shylock as "morally superior to the Christians around him... driven to cruelty only by their more cruel persecutions." In contrast, "Adler scorned justification. Total vindication was his aim." In Adler's own words, "Shylock from the first was governed by pride rather than revenge. He wishes to humble and terrify Antonio for
9944-490: The screenwriter of Forbidden Planet . While still married to Sonya, Adler had an affair with Jenny "Jennya" Kaiser, with whom he had a son, stage actor Charles Adler (1886–1966). Adler and Dinah Shtettin had a daughter, Celia Adler (1889–1979). He and Sara Heine had six children: the well-known actors Luther (1903–1984) and Stella Adler (1901–1992) and the lesser-known actors Jay (1896–1978), Frances, Julia , and Florence. Jacob and Stella Adler are both members of
10057-826: The student, Arkenholz, in the Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg . He joined Hermann Schüller in establishing the Proletarian Theatre, Stage of the Revolutionary Workers of Greater Berlin . In collaboration with writer Hans José Rehfisch , Piscator formed a theatre company in Berlin at the Comedy-Theater on Alte Jacobsstrasse, following the Volksbühne ("people's stage") concept. In 1922–1923 they staged works by Maxim Gorky , Romain Rolland , and Leo Tolstoy . As stage director at
10170-653: The time appeared to be headed for a triumphant entry into Saint Petersburg . All that changed with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II . The mourning for the tsar meant there would be no performances in the capital; in addition the political climate of Russia turned sharply against the Jews. Goldfaden's troupe soldiered on for a time—to Minsk (Belarus), to Bobruisk where they played mainly to Russian soldiers, and to Vitebsk , where he and Sonya ended up having to sue Goldfaden for their pay, and left to rejoin Rosenberg, who
10283-408: The touring company of Odets's Golden Boy and More to Give to People . Members of Group Theatre were leading interpreters of the method acting technique based on the work and writings of Stanislavski. In 1934, Adler went to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. During this period, she learned that Stanislavski had revised his theories, emphasizing that
10396-444: The travel party: Adler considered him one of the best actors in Yiddish theater, a great asset to any performances they would give in London, while he felt Rosenberg lacked depth as an actor. He tried to get Rosenberg to come with them to London, but Rosenberg would not budge. Of his time in London, Adler wrote, " if Yiddish theater was destined to go through its infancy in Russia, and in America grew to manhood and success, then London
10509-430: The troupe was arranged on a cattle ship, in exchange for entertaining the crew. However, about this time Israel Grodner and his wife Annetta reappeared. Adler wanted to include them in the group headed for London. According to Adler, Rosenberg, who played many of the same roles as Israel Grodner, essentially told Adler "it's him or me". Adler attempted to convince him to change his mind, but insisted on including Grodner in
10622-476: The university town Marburg in 1899 where Piscator attended the Gymnasium Philippinum . In the autumn of 1913, he attended a private Munich drama school and enrolled at University of Munich to study German , philosophy and art history . Piscator also took Arthur Kutscher 's famous seminar in theatre history , which Bertolt Brecht later also attended. Piscator began his acting career in
10735-462: The urging of his father; Adler attributes it to Rosenberg and Spivakovsky's "enemies". Rosenberg, never the most ethical of men, withdrew his troupe from Odesa to tour the hinterland (soon, though, he would come to an accommodation by which his troupe would be an officially recognized touring company attached to Goldfaden's own troupe). (For greater detail on Adler's time with Rosenberg's company, see Israel Rosenberg .) By his own account, Adler took
10848-447: The values of different people to understand what situations would have meant to people, when those situations might mean nothing in the actor's own culture. Without this work, Adler said that an actor walks onto the stage "naked". This approach is one for which both Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro became famous. Adler also trained actors' sensory imagination to help make the characters' experiences more vivid. She believed that mastery of
10961-556: The week. Adler, exhausted from his Russian trip, was often leaving his nights unused, and Thomashefsky offered to buy him out for $ 10,000 on the condition that he would not return to performing in New York. Adler was so insulted that the two did not speak for months, even though at the time they were living across a courtyard from one another, and could see into each other's St. Mark's Place apartments. Adler decided to perform Tolstoy 's The Power of Darkness , and decided that he would do his own translation from Russian to Yiddish. The play
11074-569: The works of modern playwrights such as Gorky , Ibsen , Shaw , Strindberg , Gerhart Hauptmann , Victor Hugo , Victorien Sardou , and Leonid Andreyev . Frequently the works of the great contemporary playwrights—even Shaw, who was writing in English—would be staged in New York in Yiddish years, even decades, before they were ever staged there in English. Having already famously played Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on
11187-629: The younger rabbi, were favorably impressed. There were even mentions in the English-language press. Playing to small audiences, on tiny stages, in communal troupes where all but the stars had day jobs, and playing only Saturday and Sunday (the pious London Jews would never have tolerated Friday performances), Adler focused on serious theater like never before. However, he and Grodner soon fell out: they wrangled over ideology and over parts, and their verbal duels boiled over into improvised stage dialogue. The Grodners ultimately left to do theater in
11300-529: Was a great success, the first successful production of a Tolstoy play in the U.S., and Thomashefsky was so obviously happy for Adler that their friendship was renewed. Adler followed with equally successful productions of Gordin's dramatization of Tolstoy's Resurrection and the Gordin original The Homeless . In 1904 Adler had the Grand Theater built in what was to be the Yiddish Theater District at
11413-482: Was appalled: "Is this theater? No my child, this is a circus." Lulla Rosenfeld's remark that Adler "...rel[ied] entirely on classics and translations of modern European plays" does not quite tell the whole story. On one hand, he was also responsible for recruiting the Yiddish theater's first naturalistic playwright, Jacob Gordin , and he scored a great triumph in the title role of Gordin's Der Yiddisher King Lear ( The Jewish King Lear ), set in 19th-century Russia. On
11526-464: Was determined to finish out her life where she was. (His father had died some years earlier.) He persuaded his sister Sarah Adler to follow him to America as her husband had died of heart disease in Verdun in 1897 and she was raising seven children on her own. She emigrated in 1905. Returning to New York, he and Thomashefsky jointly leased The People's Theater, intending to use it on different nights of
11639-507: Was his daughter Stella , who taught method acting to, among others, Marlon Brando . Adler was born in Odessa , Russian Empire (now Ukraine ). Adler's father, Feivel (Pavel) Abramovitch Adler, was a (rather unsuccessful) grain merchant . His mother, née Hessye Halperin, was a tall, beautiful woman, originally from a wealthy family in Berdichev . She became estranged from her family after divorcing her first husband (and leaving behind
11752-578: Was invited by Alvin Johnson , the founding president of The New School , to establish a theatre workshop. Among Piscator's students at this Dramatic Workshop in New York were Bea Arthur , Harry Belafonte , Marlon Brando , Tony Curtis , Ben Gazzara , Judith Malina , Walter Matthau , Rod Steiger , Elaine Stritch , Eli Wallach , Jack Creley , and Tennessee Williams . Established in New York, Erwin and Maria Ley-Piscator lived at 17 East 76th Street, an Upper East Side townhome, sometimes remembered as
11865-570: Was its school." Adler arrived in London with few contacts. In Whitechapel , the center of Jewish London at that time, he encountered extremes of poverty that he describes as exceeding any he had ever seen in Russia or would ever see in New York. The Chief Rabbi of the British Empire at that time, Dr. Nathan Marcus Adler , was a relative. Adler's father had written him a letter of introduction in Hebrew , but nothing could have been farther from
11978-405: Was just a step from a life of crime. Through his uncle Arke, "a hot theater lover", he became interested in the theater, at first in the beauty of Olga Glebova and the cut of Ivan Kozelsky 's clothes, but he had the good fortune to be in one of the great theater cities of his time. At 17 he became the leader of Glebova's claque , was working as a copyist for lawyers, and going out to a theater,
12091-449: Was married three times, first to Sophia (Sonya) Oberlander (died 1886), then to Dinah Shtettin (m. 1887- divorced. 1891) and finally to actress Sara Adler (previously Sara Heine) (m. 1891), who survived him by over 25 years. His and Sonya's daughter Rivkah (Rebecca) died at the age of 3. Sonya died from an infection contracted while giving birth to their son Abram in 1886. Abram's son Allen Adler (1916–1964) was, among other things,
12204-738: Was not to last. The years 1905–1908 saw half a million new Jewish immigrants to New York, and once again the largest audience for Yiddish theater was for lighter fare. Adler hung on, but the Thomashefskys were making a fortune at the Thalia; plays with titles like Minke the Servant Girl were far outdrawing fare like Gordin's Dementia Americana (1909). It would be 1911 before Adler scored another major success, this time with Tolstoy's The Living Corpse (also known as Redemption ), translated into Yiddish by Leon Kobrin . In 1919–1920, Adler, despite his own socialist politics, found himself in
12317-487: Was one of the groomsmen. During his years in Berlin, Piscator had collaborated with Lena Goldschmidt on a stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser 's bestselling novel An American Tragedy ; under the title The Case of Clyde Griffiths . With American Lee Strasberg as director, it had run for 19 performances on Broadway in 1936. When Piscator and Ley subsequently immigrated to the United States in 1939, Piscator
12430-531: Was playing in a tent theater in Nizhyn . However, matters there proved even worse: Nizhyn soon fell prey to a pogrom . The troupe managed to avoid bodily harm, partly by convincing the rioters that they were a French theater troupe and partly by making judicious use of the money the Adlers had won in court from Goldfaden. In Łódź , Adler triumphantly played the title role in Karl Gutzkow 's Uriel Acosta ,
12543-537: Was the only member of the Group Theatre to study with Konstantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre, but differences with Lee Strasberg over Stanislavski's system (later developed by Strasberg into method acting ) made her leave the group. Adler met with Stanislavski again later in his career and questioned him on Strasberg's interpretation. He told her that he had abandoned emotional memory, which had been Strasberg's dominant paradigm, but that they both believed that actors did not have what
12656-585: Was the youngest daughter of Sara and Jacob P. Adler , the sister of Luther , Jay , Frances, and Julia Adler and half-sister of Charles Adler and Celia Adler , star of the Yiddish Theater. All five of her siblings were actors. The Adlers comprised the Jewish American Adler acting dynasty, which had its start in the Yiddish Theater District and was a significant part of the vibrant ethnic theatrical scene that thrived in New York from
12769-533: Was well enough to perform in the title role of a revival of Gordin's The Stranger , inspired by Tennyson 's " Enoch Arden ": the character is "a sick and broken man", so the Adler was able to integrate his own physical weakness into the portrayal. However, March 31, 1926, he collapsed suddenly, dying almost instantly. He is buried in Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens . Adler
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