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Stella Adler cont.
"Stella had an 'important' birthday party (I can’t recall if she’d just turned 60 or 65), and some enthusiast went over to Sara Adler (Stella’s aged mother) to compliment her on how well she looked. 'I’m seventy,' Sara said. 'Really?' said the enthusiast. 'How can that be? Stella’s over 60!' Without hesitating, Sara replied, 'That’s her business.'"
- Arthur Miller
By the mid-1940s, Adler was teaching at the New School for Social Research and had found the role that was to make her a revered name among actors everywhere. In 1949, she started a school for acting that would last five decades and touch every part of American theatre. Combining what she had learned from the Yiddish theatre, Broadway, Hollywood, and Stanislavski, she opened the Stella Adler Theatre Studio (later renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting, and finally the Stella Adler Studio of Acting). Among her students were Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, and Candice Bergen. Her belief in the supreme seriousness of her art kept many well-known members of the theatre coming back for her intelligent and passionate advice.
"You act with your soul. That’s why you all want to be actors—because your souls are not used up by life."
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It was Adler’s sense that “the theatre exists 99% in the imagination” that informed her instruction. She proposed that one of the actor’s primary concerns must be with the emotional origins of the script. A student’s main responsibility was to search between the lines of the script for the important unsaid messages. This responsibility, she knew, required a combination of emotional availability and imagination. For her students she was both the toughest critic and the most profound inspiration, saying, “You act with your soul. That’s why you all want to be actors—because your souls are not used up by life.” To this day, Stella Adler is still viewed as one of the foremost influences on contemporary acting.
Stella Adler’s life in the theatre included a rich array of experience on which she could draw: It spanned the Yiddish tradition, the groundbreaking live contemporary theatre of the mid-century, and the commercial world of television and movies. This life, combined with her passion for the field and her respect for actors and drama as a vocation, made her an inspiring and effective teacher. She worked to help actors develop as strong, independent, and thinking human beings, connected to their imagination and passion in a way that made them live fuller lives as well as perform to the utmost of their ability. Stella Adler died in 1992, and her grandson Tom Oppenheim, an actor and director, assumed the leadership of the Studio.
"Stella Adler united the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh, and had a most profound effect on every acting talent in America for the past three generations!"
- Martin Sheen
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