Lee Strasberg (born Israel Strassberg; November 17, 1901 – February 17, 1982) was an American acting coach and actor. Born in Budzanów, Austria-Hungary, he immigrated to the United States in 1909. He co-founded, with theatre directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective". In 1951, he became director of the nonprofit Actors Studio in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school", and, in 1966, he was involved in the creation of Actors Studio West in Los Angeles.
Although other highly regarded teachers also developed versions of "The Method", Lee Strasberg is considered to be the "father of method acting in America", according to author Mel Gussow. From the 1920s until his death in 1982, "he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and film". From his base in New York, Strasberg trained several generations of theatre and film notables, including Marlon Brando, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Sally Field, Renee Taylor, Geraldine Page, Eli Wallach, and directors Andreas Voutsinas, Frank Perry, Elia Kazan, and Michael Cimino.
By 1970, Strasberg had become less involved with the Actors Studio and, with his third wife, Anna Strasberg, opened the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute with branches in New York City and in Hollywood, to continue teaching the Stanislavski's system, which he had interpreted and developed, for contemporary actors.
As an actor, Strasberg is best known for his portrayal of the primary antagonist, the gangster Hyman Roth, alongside his former student Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II (1974), a role he took at Pacino's suggestion after Kazan turned down the role, and which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also appeared in Going in Style (1979) and ...And Justice for All (1979).Lumet, Sidney, and Rapf, Joanna E. Sidney Lumet: Interviews, University of Mississippi Press, (2006)
Early years Strasberg was born Israel Strassberg into a Jewish family in Budzanów, a village then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now part of Ukraine. He was the youngest of three sons born to Ida () and Baruch Meyer Strassberg. Baruch immigrated to New York City while his family remained in Budzanów with an uncle, who worked as a rabbinical teacher. Baruch, who worked as a presser in the garment industry, sent first for his eldest son and his daughter. Finally, enough money was saved to bring over Ida and the couple's two remaining sons. In 1909, the family was reunited in Lower East Side, Manhattan, where they lived until the early 1920s. A young Strasberg took refuge in voracious reading and the companionship of his elder brother, Zalmon, whose death in the 1918 influenza pandemic was so traumatic for him that, despite being a straight-A student, he dropped out of high school.Carnicke, Sharon. Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-first Century New York: Routledge, 1988. . p. 45
A relative introduced Strasberg to the theatre by giving him a small part in a Yiddish-language production being performed by the Progressive Drama Club. He later joined the Chrystie Street Settlement House's drama club. Philip Loeb, casting director of the Theater Guild, sensed that Strasberg could act, although he was not yet thinking of a full-time acting career and was still working as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper for a wig company. At the age of 23, Strasberg enrolled in the Clare Tree Major School of the Theater. He became a naturalized United States citizen on January 16, 1939, in New York City at the New York Southern District Court.
Encounter with Stanislavski Kazan biographer Richard Schickel described Strasberg's first experiences with the art of acting:
Strasberg eventually left the Clare Tree Major School to study with students of Stanislavski — Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslawski — at the American Laboratory Theatre. In 1925, Strasberg had his first professional appearance in Processional, a play produced by the Theater Guild.Slater, Robert and Elinor. Great Jewish Men, Jonathan David Company, Inc. (1996)
According to Schickel:
Acting director and teacher Group Theater He gained a reputation with the Theater Guild of New York and helped form the Group Theater in New York in 1931.The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography, Houghton Mifflin Reference Books, (2003) There, he created a technique that became known as "The Method" or "Method Acting". His teaching style owed much to the Russian practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavski, whose book, An Actor Prepares (published in English in 1936), dealt with the psychology of acting. He began by directing, but his time was gradually taken up by the training of actors. Called "America's first true theatrical collective", the Group Theater immediately offered a few tuition-free scholarships for its three-year program to "promising students."Buford, Kate. Burt Lancaster: An American Life, DaCapo Press (2001)
Publishers Weekly wrote, "The Group Theatre ... with its self-defined mission to reconnect theater to the world of ideas and actions, staged plays that confronted social and moral issues ... with members Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella, and Luther Adler, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and an ill-assorted band of idealistic actors living hand to mouth are seen welded in a collective of creativity that was also a tangle of jealousies, love affairs, and explosive feuds."Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama, Grove Press (1994) Playwright Arthur Miller said, "the Group Theatre was unique and probably will never be repeated. For a while it was literally the voice of Depression America." Co-founder Harold Clurman, in describing what Strasberg brought to the Group Theater, wrote:
Strasberg, Kazan, Clurman, and others with the Group Theater spent the summer of 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club, located in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut.Images of America, Trumbull Historical Society, 1997, p. 123The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, Don Wilmeth, p. 21 They spent previous summers at various places in upstate New York and near Danbury, Connecticut.
Amid internecine tensions, Strasberg resigned as director of the Group Theatre in March 1937.Smith, p. 302
Actors Studio In 1947, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, also members of the Group Theatre, started the Actors Studio as a nonprofit workshop for professional and aspiring actors to concentrate on their craft away from the pressures of the commercial theatre. Strasberg assumed leadership of the studio in 1951 as its artistic director. "As a teacher and acting theorist, he revolutionized American actor training and engaged such remarkable performers as Kim Hunter, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Al Pacino." Since its inception, the Studio has been a nonprofit educational corporation chartered by the state of New York, and has been supported entirely by contributions and benefits. "We have here the possibility of creating a kind of theatre that would be a shining medal for our country", Strasberg said in 1959. UCLA acting teacher Robert Hethmon writes, "The Actors Studio is a refuge. Its privacy is guarded ferociously against the casual intruder, the seeker of curiousities, and the exploiter... The Studio helps actors to meet the enemy within... and contributes greatly to Strasberg's utterly pragmatic views on training the actor and solving his problems... [The Studio] is kept deliberately modest in its circumstances, its essence being the private room where Lee Strasberg and some talented actors can work."
Strasberg wrote, "At the studio, we do not sit around and feed each other's egos. People are shocked how severe we are on each other." Admission to the Actors Studio was usually by audition with more than a thousand actors auditioning each year and the directors usually conferring membership on only five or six. "The Studio was, and is sui generis", said Elia Kazan, proudly. Beginning in a small, private way, with a strictly off-limits-to-outsiders policy, the Studio quickly earned a high reputation in theatre circles. "It became the place to be, the forum where all the most promising and unconventional young actors were being cultivated by sharp young directors."Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness, Da Capo Publ. (1984) Actors who have worked at the studio include Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Patricia Neal, Rod Steiger, Mildred Dunnock, Eva Marie Saint, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Ben Gazzara, Sidney Poitier, Karl Malden, Gene Wilder, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, and Sally Field.Lipton, James. Inside Inside, Dutton, (2007) p. 14, other names listed
The Emmy Award-winning author of Inside Inside, James Lipton, writes that the Actors Studio became "one of the most prestigious institutions in the world" as a result of its desire to set a higher "standard" in acting. The founders, including Strasberg, demanded total commitment and extreme talent from aspiring students. Jack Nicholson auditioned five times before he was accepted; Dustin Hoffman, six times; and Harvey Keitel, 11 times. After each rejection, a candidate had to wait as long as a year to try again. Martin Landau and Steve McQueen were the only two students admitted one year, out of 2,000 candidates who auditioned. Al Pacino: "The Actors Studio meant so much to me in my life. Lee Strasberg hasn't been given the credit he deserves. Brando doesn't give Lee any credit... Next to Charlie Laughton (an acting teacher at HB Studio, and not to be confused with English actor Charles Laughton), it sort of launched me. It really did. That was a remarkable turning point in my life. It was directly responsible for getting me to quit all those jobs and just stay acting."Pacino, Al, and Grobel, Lawrence. Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel, Simon and Schuster (2006) Marlon Brando: Movie stars spawned by Strasberg's Actors Studio were of a new type that is often labeled the "rebel hero", wrote Pamela Wojcik. Historian Sam Staggs writes that "Marlon Brando was the hot, sleek engine on the Actors Studio express", and called him "[the] embodiment of method acting",Staggs, Sam. "When Blanche Met Brando: the Scandalous Story of A Streetcar Named Desire", Macmillan (2005), p. 88 but Brando was trained primarily by Stella Adler, a former member of the Group Theatre, who had a falling out with Strasberg over his interpretations of Stanislavsky's ideas." He based his acting technique on the method, once stating, "It made me a real actor. The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life and you learn to use it in creating the character you're working on. You learn how to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you've ever had." In Brando's autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, the actor claimed he learned nothing from Strasberg: "After I had some success, Lee Strasberg tried to take credit for teaching me how to act. He never taught me anything. He would have claimed credit for the sun and the moon if he believed he could get away with it. He tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him, and I never knew why. I sometimes went to the Actors Studio on Saturday mornings because Elia Kazan was teaching, and there were usually a lot of good-looking girls there, but Strasberg never taught me acting. Stella did—and later Kazan."Brando, Marlon. Songs My Mother Taught Me, Random House (1994)