Stella Adler

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stella Adler (born February 10, 1901 in New York City , † December 21, 1992 in Los Angeles ) was an American stage and film actress and acting teacher. Adler was a student of Konstantin Sergejewitsch Stanislavski .

Life

Stella Adler came from a Jewish-American family of actors whose roots were in the Ukraine : Her father Jacob P. Adler (1855–1926) was an actor in the Yiddish- American theater. Her mother Sara Adler, b. Levitskaya, her five siblings (Jay, Luther , Julia, Frances, Florence) and her half-brother Charles were actors on the Yiddish stage in New York.

Adler's stage career began at the age of five in her father's productions. In 1919 Stella Adler went to London for a year. From 1920 to 1930 she toured the USA, Europe and South America, performing in Theater des Vaudevilles as well as on Yiddish stages. At the Yiddish Art Theater in New York she was first recognized as Leading Lady under Maurice Schwartz .

Around 1930 she studied alongside her stage work at the American Laboratory Theater , which Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya had founded in 1925. The two founders were former members of the Moscow Art Theater who taught their students an early version of the teaching of the Russian actor and theater reformer Stanislavsky .

In 1931 Adler met the director and critic Harold Clurman , also at the America Laboratory Theater , with whom she was married for a second time from 1943 to 1960. In 1931, Clurman founded - together with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg - the New Yorker Group Theater , which was also based on the teachings of Stanislawski, from which the Method Acting developed. The Group Theater introduced naturalism into American theater. Adler joined this group in the spring of 1931 and, after meeting Stanislawski personally during a visit to Paris, traveled to Russia to study for five weeks at the Moscow Art Theater and as Stanislawski's private student. Along with Michael Chekhov and Ryszard Bolesławski , she was one of the few Americans who studied with Stanislawski. When she returned to New York in August 1934, she was convinced that Strasberg had not understood Stanislawski's method and had misinterpreted it. Some of her colleagues - including Sanford Meisner , Phoebe Brand, Margaret Barker and Robert Lewis - followed her argument, but Strasberg was not convinced. This contrast led to a lifelong rivalry between Strasberg and Adler, which left the Group Theater in 1935 for this reason. Occasionally she returned for a role, but after 1937 she turned away for good.

Despite the conflicts with Strasberg, Stella Adler had shown some of her best acting performances while working with the Group Theater , particularly in Clifford Odets ' play Awake and Sing , in which she played the role of Bessie Berger. After returning from Moscow, she began giving acting classes. Among her first students were Margaret Barker, Sanford Meisner, Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan .

Stella Adler's career suffered from her Jewish origins: Although a disproportionately large number of film producers in Hollywood were themselves of Jewish origin, Jewish actors had to replace their obviously Jewish names with stage names until the 1960s if they wanted to be successful. Stella Adler also called herself Stella Ardler when she went to Hollywood. In 1937 she worked on the side of John Payne in the comedy film Love on Toast produced by Emanuel Cohen . This film was directed by Ewald André Dupont , who emigrated from Germany after the Nazi seizure of power . After a four-year hiatus, a role followed in 1941 in the MGM production The Shadow of the Thin Man . The third and final film in which Stella Adler took part was My Girl Tisa , an émigré drama starring Lilli Palmer , Sam Wanamaker and Akim Tamiroff , in which Adler was only given a supporting role.

In the early 1940s, Adler left Hollywood and worked on Broadway and in London as an actress and director. She also began teaching at the Dramatic Workshop , founded by Erwin Piscator in 1940 at the New School for Social Research . In 1949 she founded her own school, the Stella Adler Theater Studio , which was later named Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting and which continues to exist as the Stella Adler Studio of Acting .

Stella Adler's first marriage in London was the businessman Horace Oliashev, whom she left pregnant; In 1930 Ellen Adler was born, who also became an actress. In his third marriage, Adler married the writer Mitchell A. Wilson († 1973).

Adler's circle of friends included the composers Aaron Copland , Milton Babbitt , Leonard Bernstein and Oscar Levant , the critic Irving Howe , the writer Irwin Shaw , the painter Jacques Lipchitz and the actors Joseph Schildkraut , Franchot Tone and John Garfield .

Stella Adler's grave is in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, New York .

Stanislavsky method

By imparting Stanislawski's method - which is synonymous with realistic acting - Stella Adler became an influential acting teacher of the 20th century. Her interpretation of Method Acting differed so much from Strasberg's that some of her students refused to associate their style of work with the Strasberg-coined name Method Acting . Above all, Adler advised her students to use the moods offered to them by the other actors on stage for a credible performance and not - as Strasberg recommended - to draw from the reservoir of their personal memories. Strasberg urged his students to research the convincing portrayal of a role in their private memories (“technique of substitution”), which, according to Adler, puts them in the ambivalent position of simultaneously thinking about their own life and embodying a stranger . Stanislawski taught them: the source of the drama is imagination, and the key to its problems is authenticity, authenticity in the circumstances of the play. After Strasberg's death, Adler declared: This man threw the American theater back 100 years.

Stella Adler's students included Marlon Brando , Jocelyn Brando , Roy Scheider , Warren Beatty , Harvey Keitel , Martin Sheen , Robert De Niro , Candice Bergen , Bud Cort , Vincent D'Onofrio , Kate Mulgrew , Christoph Waltz, and Benicio del Toro .

Awards

Stage appearances (selection)

  • 1906: Broken Hearts
  • 1907: Richard III.
  • 1919: Elisha Ben Avia (in London)
  • 1924: The World We Live In
  • 1926: The Straw Hat
  • 1927: Big Lake
  • 1931: The House of Connelly
  • 1932: Night Over Taos
  • 1932: Success Story
  • 1933: Big Night
  • 1933: Hilda Cassidy
  • 1934: Gentlewoman
  • 1934: Gold Eagle Guy
  • 1935: Awake and Sing!
  • 1935: Paradise Lost
  • 1943: Sons and Soldiers
  • 1944: Pretty Little Parlor
  • 1946: He Who Gets Slapped

Director (selection)

  • 1943: Manhattan Nocturne
  • 1952: Sunday Breakfast

Filmography

documentation

  • 2000: Stella Adler: Awake & Dream

Publications

literature

Web links

Commons : Stella Adler  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Manso: Brando. The biography. Hyperion, New York 1994, ISBN 0-7868-6063-4 , pp. 106, 153.
  2. ^ Peter Manso: Brando. The biography. Hyperion, New York 1994, ISBN 0-7868-6063-4 , p. 153.
  3. ↑ Entry at filmreference.com
  4. ↑ Stella Adler Receives Hollywood Walk of Fame Star ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ The author related the protagonist Dorthea Holtz to Stella Adler. Review by Oliver vom Hove (Die Presse).
personal data
SURNAME Adler, Stella
BRIEF DESCRIPTION american actress
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York , United States
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1992
Place of death Los Angeles , California , United States