Free De Niro: A Life by Shawn Levy Page B

American Laboratory Theatre. She relocated to Paris for a time in the 1930s, becoming the only American actor ever to study with Stanislavski himself. Upon her return, she was among the ardent modernists who created the Group Theatre, which wasdedicated to translating the Russian director’s theories of stagecraft, dramaturgy, and acting, into an American idiom; the remarkable roster of founders included Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, Sanford Meisner, John Garfield, and Franchot Tone, and above all Harold Clurman, the architect of this acting revolution (and incidentally, Adler’s second husband). In time, the likes of Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb would become involved in the Group Theatre, helping to form a pantheon of talents whose stage, film, and classroom work would give rise to a half century and more of American masterpieces.
    In the 1940s, Adler taught occasionally at Erwin Piscator and Maria Ley-Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, but by the end of that decade she had all but retired from acting and opened a school of her own, where she espoused a philosophy of acting that was distinct from the Piscators’ and from that of her Group Theatre colleague and pedagogical rival Lee Strasberg—and maybe even from that of Stanislavski himself.
    For Strasberg, whose Actors Studio became the high temple of the Method, Stanislavski’s “emotion memory” meant that actors must explicitly find a reality within themselves to express the situations presented by the script; focusing on the actual emotions of the men and women who were acting the roles of fictional people, he encouraged the use of what he called “sense memory,” an ability to recall, on command, an emotional sensation in an actor’s own life that corresponded to the one demanded by a scene.
    For Adler, Stanislavski’s words and deeds meant something quite different—and she loved citing the fact that she’d personally studied with the man as proof that she was correct. She understood the principal task of Stanislavskian acting to be an imaginative commingling of the actor with the text and with the human situations contained in it—not a mining of the self to fill the emotions of the scene with traces of one’s own life, but an effort to picture oneself in the shoes of one’s character and then behaving as one’s character would.
    “The play is not in the words,” Adler declared in one of her most famous precepts, “it is in
you.
” She stressed using the imagination to deepen and expand the meaning of a scene; focusing on action and interaction as a means of communicating; cultivating the actor’s psyche, spirit, and personality beyond mere stagecraft; and, especially, interpretingthe script—a sometimes technical means of inhabiting and absorbing the material to be performed. “Your talent is in your choice” was her other most famous dictum (and Robert De Niro’s favorite). She taught actors to use the script and the world around them to create a performance, and not, as she thought Strasberg did, to psychoanalyze themselves and use what they’d found to make the script their own.
    When Method actors Montgomery Clift and, more explosively, Marlon Brando broke into the Hollywood mainstream, Adler was lifted along with them. Brando was her most famous student (he surely relished the in-joke in his famous bellow “Stella!”), and she was immediately recognized as among the most important teachers of the newly dominant American acting style. At the time De Niro entered her class, Adler could count among her past and present students the likes of Warren Beatty, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and Elaine Stritch. By the dawn of the 1960s, her class was the largest in New York, and students would come from literally all over the world, sometimes to be launched into stardom or at least a career, sometimes to suffer withering dismissal. (A sign posted outside the classroom cautioned, “Stella wants everyone to know