Stella adler biography wikipedia

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Stella Adler transformed a generation of American actors through her understanding of Method acting. Born into a family famed for elevating Yiddish theater to a more nuanced art, Adler quickly achieved star status in her own right. Alder was impacted by her studies of the Stanislavsky Method at the American Laboratory Theater School and traveled to Paris to directly challenge Stanislavsky.

Surprised that Americans were using his techniques, Stanislavsky helped Adler rethink the possibilities of Method acting.

Where was stella adler born

Through the strength of her convictions, the integrity of her character, and the brilliance of her mind, Adler embodied the art of the dramatic profession and remained an influential figure throughout a career that spanned most of the century. Her education in New York City public schools always took second place to rehearsals and performances.

There followed a period of time on the road, including tours of Europe and Latin America. Back in New York, she enrolled at the newly established American Laboratory Theater school, where she studied with Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who were then introducing their students to the revolutionary acting technique of Konstantin Stanislavsky.

Their intent was to create an ensemble of players, directors, designers, and writers to produce socially relevant plays that would provide an alternative to commercial theater. To develop true ensemble acting, they decided that everyone connected with a production—playwright, actor, stage designer—had to come to agreement on the meaning and perspective of the play.

Clurman invited Adler to join the new theater, initiating a love-hate relationship between the highly individualistic star and the communally committed Group. Although she has written that Clurman was her savior, Adler hated having to submerge her personality into the ensemble, rotating between starring roles and bit parts. Clurman maintained that the discipline was healthy, but Adler felt that the women in the company were coerced into going along with the men.

With all the imperious flamboyance of an older theatrical tradition—European in its roots—she was somehow fragile, vulnerable, gay with mother wit and stage fragrance. The earliest members of the group included some thirty actors and playwrights, many of whom went on to stardom, including Morris Carnovsky, Clifford Odets, and Franchot Tone.

Elia Kazan joined later as an apprentice.