Sanford Meisner

Sanford Meisner (August 31, 1905 – February 2, 1997) was an American actor and acting teacher, born in Brooklyn, New York, who appeared on Broadway from 1924 to 1958 and developed what became known as the Meisner technique, one of the most widely taught approaches to acting in the United States.

Meisner was the oldest child of Hermann Meisner, a furrier, and Bertha Knoepfler, both Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His younger siblings were Jacob, Ruth, and Robert. During a family trip to the Catskills taken to improve Sanford's health, his brother Jacob contracted bovine tuberculosis from unpasteurized milk and died shortly afterward. Meisner later described this loss as the dominant emotional influence of his life. His parents blamed him for the death, and the resulting guilt left him isolated and withdrawn as a young person. He found an outlet in the family piano and went on to attend the Damrosch Institute of Music, now the Juilliard School, where he trained to become a concert pianist. When the Great Depression arrived, his father removed him from music school to assist with the family business in New York City's Garment District. Meisner credited the long days spent hauling bolts of fabric with sharpening his sense of sound, as he passed the time mentally replaying classical pieces he had studied. He later drew on this heightened auditory attention in his teaching, frequently listening to student scene work with his eyes closed.

After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in 1923, Meisner pursued acting professionally. He had performed at the Chrystie Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side under Lee Strasberg's direction, and at age nineteen was hired as an extra by the Theatre Guild for their production of They Knew What They Wanted. That experience confirmed acting as his central ambition. He and Strasberg both appeared in the Theatre Guild's production of the Rodgers and Hart revue The Garrick Gaieties, the show from which the song "Manhattan" originated. Meisner subsequently received a scholarship to study at the Theatre Guild of Acting, where he again encountered Strasberg and Harold Clurman. In 1931, Clurman, Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford selected twenty-eight actors to form the Group Theatre, with Meisner among them. He summered with the company at their 1936 rehearsal headquarters at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut.

Within the Group Theatre, Meisner grew resistant to Strasberg's emphasis on affective memory exercises. In 1934, fellow company member Stella Adler returned from study with Konstantin Stanislavski in Paris and reported that Stanislavski had come to regard the use of personal memory as only a last resort, favoring instead physical action, imagination, and belief in the given circumstances of a text. This shifted Meisner's thinking and set him on a distinct path. His approach centered on what he called the reality of doing, and it departed from method acting precisely in its rejection of affective memory as a primary tool.

His Broadway career spanned more than three decades and included productions such as The Cold Wind and the Warm, The Bird Cage, Crime and Punishment, The Whole World Over, and Embezzled Heaven, among others. During the early years of his teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse, he was briefly married to actress Peggy Meredith, who appeared in several Broadway productions.

In 1935, Meisner joined the faculty of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he served as Director of the Acting Department until his retirement in 1990 and as Director Emeritus until his death. When the Group Theatre disbanded in 1940, he continued developing his technique at the Playhouse, drawing on Stanislavski's system, his training with Strasberg, and Adler's insights about the imagination. The Actors Studio was founded in 1947 by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, and Meisner was among its first instructors. After Kazan moved to Hollywood and Strasberg assumed the Studio's artistic directorship in 1951, Strasberg's public claims of credit for training the Studio's prominent alumni created a lasting animosity between him and Meisner that persisted until Strasberg's death.

Among the students Meisner taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse were Robert Duvall, Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Jeff Goldblum, Tony Randall, Sydney Pollack, David Mamet, Mary Steenburgen, Allison Janney, Dylan McDermott, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Meloni, and Chris Noth, among many others.

In 1983, Meisner and his life partner James Carville founded the Meisner/Carville School of Acting on the Caribbean island of Bequia, which beginning in 1985 also operated in North Hollywood. In spring 1995, that school was succeeded by the Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts, a theater company and school in North Hollywood established by Meisner, Carville, and Martin Barter. Meisner died on February 2, 1997.