Stella Adler

Stella Adler (February 10, 1901 – December 21, 1992) was an American actress and acting teacher born on Manhattan's Lower East Side in New York City. The youngest daughter of Sara and Jacob P. Adler, she was the sister of Luther, Jay, Frances, and Julia Adler and half-sister of Charles Adler and Celia Adler. All five of her siblings were actors. The Adlers were part of the Jewish-American acting dynasty rooted in the Yiddish Theater District, a significant presence in New York's ethnic theatrical scene from the late 19th century through the 1950s.

Adler began performing at the age of four, making her stage debut in Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre as part of her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company. Her early career left little time for formal education, though she studied at public schools and New York University when her schedule permitted. At eighteen, she made her London debut as Naomi in Elisa Ben Avia with her father's company, remaining with the production for a year. During that London period she met and married her first husband, Englishman Horace Eliashcheff; the marriage ended in divorce. She made her English-language Broadway debut in 1922 as the Butterfly in The World We Live In, and also spent a season performing on the vaudeville circuit.

In 1925, Adler joined the American Laboratory Theatre, where she was introduced to Konstantin Stanislavski's theories through founders Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, both former members of the Moscow Art Theater. In 1931, she joined the Group Theatre in New York, founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, alongside Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, and others. Through the Group Theatre she appeared in productions including Success Story by John Howard Lawson and two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, the latter among her verified Broadway credits. She also directed the touring company of Odets's Golden Boy. In 1934, she traveled to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied with Stanislavski directly for five weeks, during which she learned that he had revised his theories to emphasize imagination over emotional memory. This led to a fundamental break with Strasberg over the principles of method acting. She later married Clurman in 1943.

Her Broadway career spanned from 1926 to 1946 and included productions such as Big Lake, Gold Eagle Guy, The House of Connelly, Paradise Lost, and Sons and Soldiers, among others. In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood, where she appeared in films under the name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theatre until it dissolved in 1941. She appeared in three films in total: Love on Toast (1937), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), and My Girl Tisa (1948). Her later stage work included the 1946 revival of He Who Gets Slapped and the 1961 black comedy Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, which marked the conclusion of her acting career after 55 years. She also directed a 1956 revival of the Paul Green and Kurt Weill antiwar musical Johnny Johnson.

After returning to New York, Adler taught first at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research before founding the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949. She also taught at the New School, the Yale School of Drama, and led the undergraduate drama department at New York University for many years. In later life she taught part time in Los Angeles with the assistance of her protégée, actress Joanne Linville, who continued to teach Adler's technique. Among her students were Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Steve McQueen, Dolores del Río, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Warren Beatty, Benicio del Toro, and Peter Bogdanovich. In 1988, she published The Technique of Acting, with a foreword written by Brando.

Central to Adler's teaching was the principle that actors should stimulate emotional experience through imagination and the given circumstances of a text rather than by drawing on personal memory. She held that an actor's work was divided equally between internal elements — imagination, emotion, action, and will — and external ones, including characterization, movement, voice, and physical expression. She emphasized that actors must research the values and cultural contexts of the characters they portray, arguing that without such preparation an actor walks onto the stage unprepared. Adler was the only member of the Group Theatre to study directly with Stanislavski, and her divergence from Strasberg's interpretation of his system shaped her distinct approach to actor training throughout her career.