Free De Niro: A Life by Shawn Levy Page A

drum up business for me. But I wasn’t interested in doing her portrait or anyone else’s.” In Venice, Bobby had a surprise when he visited Peggy Guggenheim’s art collection at her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and found a picture by Virginia Admiral hanging in the permanent collection. As his father recalled, “He was particularly proud that his mother made a breakthrough for recognition that eludes so many women in art.” Eventually his money ran out, but not his taste for spur-of-the-moment travel and adventure. Before he settled on a way of life, he would feel the urge of the road again.
    B ACK HOME , Bobby locked in on acting in a more profound way than he had before, chiefly by entrusting himself to the famed teacher Stella Adler, who professed her craft at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting.
    And
professing
is exactly what Adler did. A grand dame of the theater, she dressed, spoke, and bore herself with a regal air, and her speech, whether recounting performances she’d seen onstage or critiquing student efforts in her classroom, could veer almost violently from poetic exaltation to lacerating dismissal. She insisted that her class greet her each day by calling out “Good morning, Miss Adler” in unison, and in later years she would end class by asking them if they loved her. “When you stand on stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world,” she wrote, “and that what you say is so important that the whole world must listen”—and by all accounts she comported herself as if she were
always
onstage.
    If that seemed a bit much, Adler could back it up. The daughter of Jacob Adler, a titan of the Yiddish theater, she was one of the pivotal figures in the rise of Method acting as an American style, virtuallyfrom the day it began. Along with other fevered young New York theater people, she had been wowed by the Moscow Art Theatre when the company visited New York in the 1920s, and she had fallen under the influence of two of its members: Richard Boleslawski, who stayed on in the States to operate a school and repertory company called the American Laboratory Theatre, and Maria Ouspenskaya, who also stayed, mainly to perform but also to teach. Through them, like so many others in the New York theater, Adler had taken as her master the great actor, theoretician, and impresario Constantin Stanislavski, whose performances, lectures, and writings would become the core of the Method revolution in American acting.
    Library shelves would one day groan with Stanislavski’s works and myriad books about his “system,” which was a rigorous and thorough approach to the problems and craft of acting. He hoped to rationalize the art by prescribing a litany of skills that actors should acquire and goals for which they should strive. Most radically, he proposed that acting was a psychological undertaking, rather than, as previous generations’ performances indicated, a representational one. In opposition to old-style actors who adopted stances, attitudes, and inflections that revealed emotions in a kind of exaggerated dummy show, Stanislavski argued that actors should experience the emotions indicated by the playwright and express those emotions onstage as they would in real life. To enable actors to do this, he spoke of something he called “emotion memory,” a practice of finding a correlation between the character’s situation and the actor’s own inner life and history. Stanislavski wasn’t dogmatic about the practice of mining one’s actual psyche or past—in fact, he feared it might evoke hysteria. And he acknowledged that there were outstanding actors who achieved similar effects without following his ideas. But taken as a whole, his theories amounted to a revolutionary reconsideration of the craft and intent of acting.
    Adler, a voracious creature of the theater, was thoroughly taken with Stanislavski’s system, both its theory and as it was practiced by the Moscow Art Theatre and