Celia Adler

Celia Feinman Adler was born Tzirele Adler on December 6, 1889, in New York City, and went on to become one of the most celebrated figures in American theatrical history, earning the title "First Lady of the Yiddish Theatre." She was the daughter of Jacob Adler and Dinah Shtettin, both actors in the Yiddish theater, and the half-sister of Stella Adler and Luther Adler. Her parents had met and married in London before relocating to the United States shortly before her birth. After Jacob Adler eloped with Sara Heine, Dinah Shtettin married the actor and playwright Sigmund Feinman, and Adler was raised by her mother and stepfather, using the surname Feinman throughout her childhood before later adopting Adler for her stage career.

Her theatrical life began almost from infancy. Shtettin brought the child onstage as a prop as early as six months old while continuing to work with Jacob Adler's troupe. At age four, Adler performed in The Yiddish King Lear alongside her father and stepmother, in a role that playwright Jacob Gordin had written specifically for her. After playing numerous child roles in the Yiddish theater, she stepped away from the stage during her teenage years before resuming her career in 1909 as Celia Feinman, encouraged by actress Bertha Kalisch, with whom she co-starred in a production of Hermann Sudermann's Heimat. She performed alongside her mother at the London Pavilion Theatre and toured with her in 1910. When Boris Thomashefsky hired her as an understudy at the New York People's Theater, she began performing under the name Celia Adler. Her first major dramatic success came in 1913 with Ossip Dymou's The Eternal Wanderer at Thomashefsky's National Theater in New York.

In 1918, Adler joined the Yiddish Art Theater, which staged as many as thirty-five productions per season and relied heavily on actors improvising their lines. She was typically cast as a weeping maiden or desperate mother. Together with Jacob Ben-Ami, she persuaded director Maurice Schwartz to stage a serious drama, which proved an immediate success, though it did not alter Schwartz's overall approach to directing. In 1919, Ben-Ami broke away to form the Jewish Art Theater, which Adler joined. That company staged works by Jewish playwrights alongside Yiddish translations of English, Russian, and German plays at the Irving Palace Theater, though it was short-lived due to a conflict with its financial backer. In the 1921–22 season, Adler served as leading lady in Schwartz's troupe. She subsequently guest-starred in Philadelphia with Anshel Schorr and toured Europe and America with Ludwig Satz. In 1927–28, she directed her own repertory company. Throughout her career, Adler created leading roles in Yiddish versions of works by Hauptmann, Sudermann, Ibsen, Shaw, and Shakespeare.

When she appeared in an English-language production of David Pinski's The Treasure — one of her Broadway credits — Adler published a letter in the Yiddish World to reassure her audience that her commitment to Yiddish theater remained unchanged. Following World War II, she was contracted by the Jewish Welfare Board to perform for troops in American military camps with a program conducted in both English and Yiddish, which she later brought off-Broadway. In 1946, Adler appeared on Broadway in A Flag Is Born, written by Ben Hecht and directed by Luther Adler, in which she gave one of the earliest theatrical portrayals of a Holocaust survivor. The production also featured Paul Muni and a twenty-two-year-old Marlon Brando, identified as Stella Adler's prize pupil in method acting. Adler, along with Muni and Brando, declined compensation above the Actor's Equity minimum wage out of dedication to the cause of establishing a Jewish state in Israel. Though the production had been expected to run for one month, it continued for thirty weeks. Her Broadway career spanned from 1920 to 1946.

In 1937, Adler starred in the Henry Lynn Yiddish film Where Is My Child, and between 1937 and 1952 she appeared in additional films and television programs. Her final film appearance came in the 1985 British documentary Almonds and Raisins, which featured archive footage and was narrated in part by Orson Welles, Herschel Bernardi, and Seymour Rechzeit. Her last stage appearance was in 1961 in A Worm in Horseradish, though she continued to participate in recitals, benefits, and lectures until her death.

Adler was married three times. She wed actor Lazar Freed in 1914; the couple had one child, Selwyn (Zelig) Freed, and divorced in 1919. In 1930 she married theatrical manager Jack Cone, who died in 1959. Later that same year she married businessman Nathan Forman, who died one month before Adler herself. Adler died on January 31, 1979, from a stroke and is buried in the Yiddish Theatre Section of Mount Hebron Cemetery in New York City.