Lee Strasberg (November 17,
1901 – February 17, 1982) was an American
actor,
director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with director
Harold Clurman, the
Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as
"America's first true theatrical
collective".
In 1951, he became director of the non-profit
Actors
Studio
, in New York
City
, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting
school". In 1969, Strasberg founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre
and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood
to teach the work he pioneered.
He was the chief proponent of "
Method
acting" from the 1920s until his death in 1982, and according
to acting author
Mel Gussow, "he
revolutionized the art of acting and had a profound influence on
performance in American theater and movies". From his base in New
York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most
illustrious talents, including
Anne
Bancroft,
Dustin Hoffman,
Montgomery Clift,
James Dean,
Marilyn
Monroe,
Julie Harris,
Paul Newman,
Al Pacino
and director
Elia Kazan.
Former student
Elia Kazan directed
James Dean in
East of Eden (1955), for which
Kazan and Dean were nominated for
Academy
Awards. Dean once wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest
school of the theater [and] the best thing that can happen to an
actor". In more recent years, directors like
Sidney Lumet have intentionally used actors
skilled in Strasberg's "Method".
Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the aura
of a prophet, a magician, a
witch
doctor, a
psychoanalyst, and a
feared father of a
Jewish home.... [H]e was
the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together,
and made them 'permanent.'" Today,
Ellen
Burstyn,
Al Pacino, and
Harvey Keitel lead this
nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of
actors, playwrights, and directors.
Early years
Lee
Strasberg was born Israel Strassberg in the former
Austro-Hungarian Empire (now
Budaniv, Ukraine
) to Jewish
parents, Baruch Meyer Strassberg and Ida Diner, and was the
youngest of three sons. His father immigrated to New York
while his family remained in their home village with an uncle, a
rabbinical teacher. His father, 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 his
wife and his two remaining sons.
In 1909 the family was reunited on
Manhattan
's Lower East Side, where they lived until the early
twenties. Young Strasberg took refuge in voracious reading
and the companionship of his older brother, Zalmon, whose death in
the
influenza epidemic of
1918 was so
traumatic for
the young Strasberg that, despite being a straight-A student, he
dropped out of high school. A relative introduced him to the
theater by giving him a small part in a
Yiddish-language production that was 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 fulltime
acting career, and was still working as a shipping clerk and
bookkeeper for a wig company. When he was 23 years old he enrolled
in the
Clare Tree Major School of the
Theater.
Life-shaping revelation
Kazan
biographer Richard Schickel
described Strasberg's first experiences to the "art" of
acting:
He dropped out of high school, worked in a
shop that made hairpieces, drifted into the theater via a
settlement house company and … had his life-shaping revelation when
Stanislavsky brought his Moscow Art
Theatre
to the United States in 1923.
He had seen good acting before, of course, but never an
ensemble like this with actors completely surrendering their egos
to the work....
[H]e observed, first of all, that all the actors,
whether they were playing leads or small parts, worked with the
same commitment and intensity.
No actors idled about posing and preening (or thinking
about where they might dine after the performance).
More important, every actor seemed to project some sort
of unspoken, yet palpable, inner life for his or her
character.
This was acting of a sort that one rarely saw on the
American stage ...
[w]here there was little stress on the psychology of
the characters or their interactions....
Strasberg was galvanized.
He knew that his own future as an actor – he was a
slight and unhandsome man – was limited.
But he soon perceived that as a theoretician and
teacher of this new 'system' it might become a major force in
American theater.
Strasberg eventually left the Clare Tree Major School to study with
students of Stanislavsky –
Maria
Ouspenskaya and
Richard
Boleslavsky – at the American Laboratory Theater. In 1925
Strasberg had his first professional appearance in
Processional, a play produced by the Theater Guild.
According to Schickel:
What Strasberg... took away from the Actor's Lab was a
belief that just as an actor could be prepared physically for his
work with dance, movement and fencing
classes, he could be mentally prepared by resort to analogous
mental exercises.
They worked on relaxation as well as
concentration.
They worked with nonexistent objects that helped
prepare them for the exploration of equally ephemeral
emotions.
They learned to used “affective memory”, as Strasberg
called the most controversial aspect of his teaching — summoning
emotions from their own lives to illuminate their stage
roles....
Strasberg believed he could codify this system, a
necessary precursor to teaching it to anyone who wanted to learn
it...
[H]e became a director more preoccupied with getting
his actors to work in the “correct” way than he was in shaping the
overall presentation.
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. There he created
a technique which became known as "the Method" or "method acting."
His teaching style owed much to the Russian director,
Stanislavsky, whose book,
An Actor
Prepares, dealt with the
psychology
of
interpretation in 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
Lab immediately offered a few tuition-free scholarships for its
three-year program to "promising students".
Lee Strasberg at the Actors
Studio
Publishers Weekly wrote
"The Group Theatre... [w]ith its self-defined mission to reconnect
theater to the world of ideas and actions, staged plays that
confronted social and moral issues... [w]ith 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." Playwright
Arthur Miller said "the Group Theatre was
unique and probably will never be repeated. For awhile it was
literally the voice of Depression America".
Co-founder
Harold Clurman, in
describing what Strasberg brought to the Group Theater, wrote:
Lee Strasberg is one of the few artists among American
theater directors.
He is the director of introverted feeling, of strong
emotion curbed by ascetic control, sentiment of great intensity
muted by delicacy, pride, fear, shame.
The effect he produces is a clasic hush, tense and
tragic, a constant conflict so held in check that a kind of
beautiful spareness results.
The roots are clearly in the intimate experience of a
complex psychology, an acute awareness of human contradiction and
suffering.
Actors
In 1947,
Elia Kazan,
Robert Lewis, and
Cheryl Crawford, also members of the Group
Theatre, started the Actors Studio as a non-profit 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... [T]he 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 ... [and] 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 each year. "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 cricles. "It
became the place to be, the forum where all the most promising and
unconventional young actors were being cultivated by sharp young
directors..." 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,
Shelley Winters and
Sally Field.
Strasberg acting with Al Pacino in
Godfather II
- 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 [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.
- Marlon Brando: Movie stars spawned by Strasberg's
Actors Studio were of a new type which is often labeled the "rebel
hero", wrote Pamela Wojcik. Historian Sam Staggs writes that
"Brando was the hot, sleek engine on the Actors Studio express",
and called him "[the] embodiment of Method acting", 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, "[I]t 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 to dig into your unconscious and make use of every
experience you ever had."
- James Dean
According to
James Dean biographer W.
Bast,"Proud of this accomplishment, Dean referred to the studio in
a 1952 letter, when he was 21 years old, to his family as 'The
greatest school of the theater. It houses great people like Marlon
Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Mildred Dunnock ... [V]ery
few get into it.... It is the best thing that can happen to an
actor. I am one of the youngest to belong.'"
- Marilyn Monroe
Film author
Maurice Zolotow wrote:
"Between
The Seven Year
Itch and
Some Like it
Hot only four years elapsed, but her world had changed.
She had become one of the most celebrated personalities in the
world. She had divorced
Joe Di Maggio.
She had married
Arthur Miller. She had
become a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She was seriously studying
acting. She was reading good books."
- Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams' plays have
been populated by graduates of the studio, where he felt that
"studio actors had a more intense and honest style of
acting".He wrote, "They act from the inside out. They
communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of
life." Williams was also a founder of the group and a key member of
its playwright's wing, and later wrote
A Streetcar Named
Desire, Brando's greatest early role.
- Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda recalled that at the age of
five, she and her brother, actor
Peter
Fonda, acted out Western stories similar to those her father,
Henry Fonda, played in the movies. She
attended Vassar College and went to Paris for two years to study
art. Upon returning, she met Lee Strasberg and the meeting changed
the course of her life, Fonda saying, "I went to the Actor's Studio
and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the
first time that anyone, except my father--who had to say so--told
me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I
went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting.
It was like the roof had come off my life!"
Teaching methods and philosophy
In describing his teaching philosophy, Strasberg wrote, "The two
areas of discovery that were of primary importance in my work at
the Actors Studio and in my private classes where improvisation and
affective memory. It is finally by using these techniques that the
actor can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the
character".
Methods of teaching
Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great
depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his
approach in this way:
The human being who acts is the human being who
lives.
That is a terrifying circumstance.
Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life
the stimuli to which we respond are always real.
The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are
imaginary.
And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in
life, but actually more fully and more expressively.
Although the actor can do things in life quite easily,
when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious
conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human
being merely to playact at imitating life.
He must somehow believe.
He must somehow be able to convince himself of the
rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the
stage.
According to film critic/author
Mel
Gussow, Strasberg required that an actor, when preparing for a
role, delve not only into the character's life in the play, but
also, "[F]ar more importantly, into the character's life before the
curtain rises. In rehearsal, the character's prehistory, perhaps
going back to childhood, is discussed and even acted out. The play
became the climax of the character's existence."
Elia Kazan as student
In
Elia Kazan's autobiography, the
Academy Award-winning director wrote
about his earliest memories of Strasberg as teacher:
He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician,
a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish
home.
He was the center of the camp's activities that summer,
the core of the vortex.
Everything in camp revolved around him.
Preparing to direct the play that was to open the
coming season, as he had the three plays of the season before, he
would also give the basic instruction in acting, laying down the
principles of the art by which the Group worked, the guides to
their artistic training.
He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of
the theatre together, made them 'permanent'.
He did this not only by his superior knowledge but by
the threat of his anger...
[H]e enjoyed his eminence just as the admiral
would.
Actors are as self-favoring as the rest of humanity,
and perhaps the only way they could be held together to do their
work properly was by the threat of an authority they
respected.
And feared.
No one questioned his dominance – he spoke holy writ –
his leading role in that summer's activities, and his right to all
power.
To win his favor became everyone's goal.
His explosions of temper maintained the discipline of
this camp of high-strung people.
I came to believe that without their fear of this man,
the Group would fly apart, everyone going in different directions
instead of to where he was pointing....
I was afraid of him too.
Even as I admired him.
Lee was making an artistic revolution and knew
it.
An organization such as the Group – then in its second
year, which is to say still beginning, still being shaped – lives
only by the will of a fanatic and the drive with which he propels
his vision.
He has to be unswerving, uncompromising, and
unadjustable.
Lee knew this.
He'd studied other revolutions, political and
artistic.
He knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his
mission and its importance.
Classroom settings
Kazan also described his classes:
At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid
down the rules, supervised the first exercises.
These were largely concerned with the actor's arousing
his inner temperament.
The essential and rather simple technique, which has
since then been complicated by teachers of acting who seek to make
the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists
of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding
an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past.
It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we
may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and
find, to our surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we
felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to
kill.
The actor becomes aware that he has emotional
resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great
number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the
materials of his art....
Lee taught his actors to launch their work on every
scene by taking a minute to remember the details surrounding the
emotional experience in their lives that would correspond to the
emotion of the scene they were about to play.
'Take a minute!' became the watchword of that summer,
the phrase heard most often, just as this particular kind of inner
concentration became the trademark of Lee's own work when he
directed a production.
His actors often appeared to be in a state of
self-hypnosis.
On James Dean
James Dean in
East of
Eden
In 1956, Strasberg student
James Dean,
already nominated for two Oscars, died in a sports-car accident,
aged 24. Strasberg, during a regular lecture shortly after this
accident, discussed Dean. The following are excerpts from a
transcription of the recorded lecture:
(In the middle of his lecture on another topic) To hell
with it!
I hadn't planned to say this, because I don't know how
I'll behave when I say it; I don't think it will bother
me.
But I saw Jimmy Dean in Giant the other night, and I must say that
– (he weeps.) You see, that's what I was afraid of.
(A long pause.) When I got in the cab, I
cried....
[W]hat I cried at was the waste, the
waste....
If there is anything in the theatre to which I respond
more than anything else – maybe I'm getting old, or maybe I'm
getting sentimental – it is the waste in the theatre, the talent
that gets up and the work that goes into getting it up and getting
it where it should be.
And then when it gets there, what the hell happens with
it?
The senseless destruction, the senseless waste, the
hopping about from one thing to the next, the waste of the talent,
the waste of your lives, the strange kind of behavior that not just
Jimmy had, you see, but that a lot of you here have and a lot of
other actors have that are going through exactly the same
thing....
As soon as you grow up as actors, as soon as you reach
a certain place, there it goes, the drunkenness and the rest of it,
as if, now that you've really made it, the incentive goes, and
something happens which to me is just terrifying.
I don't know what to do....
The only answer possibly is that we somehow here find a
way, a means, an organization, a plan which should really
contribute to the theatre, so that there should not only be the
constant stimulus to your individual development, which I think we
have provided, but also that once your individual development is
established, it should then actually contribute to the theatre,
rather than to an accidental succession of good, bad, or
indifferent things.
But I am very, very scared that despite how strongly I
feel, or despite how stimulated you become, nothing will be
done….and we will just continue to get so caught up that in a
strange way we do not really live our lives....
[To] me that is the future of the Studio, that a
unified body of people should somehow be connected with a tangible,
consistent, and continuous effort.
That is the dream I have always had.
That is what got me into theatre in the first
place.
That was the thing that got me involved in The Actors
Studio...
[a]nd now it becomes time to think a little bit more
about our responsibility for that individual
talent....
I'm stuck.
I don't know.
And this is really the problem of the
Studio.
On Marilyn Monroe
In 1962, one of Strasberg's most successful students,
Marilyn Monroe, died at the age of 36 as a
result of probable suicide. Strasberg once claimed that out of all
the actors he had worked with, she was the one who stood out way
above the rest, second only to Marlon Brando. At the time of her
death, she was at the height of her career. In 1999 she was ranked
the sixth greatest female star of all time by the
American Film Institute. Strasberg
gave the eulogy at her funeral.
For us, Marilyn was a devoted and loyal friend – a
colleague constantly reaching for perfection.
We shared her pain and difficulties, and some of her
joys.
She was a member of our family....
It is difficult to accept the fact that her zest for
life has been ended by this dreadful accident.
Despite the heights and brilliance she had attained on
the screen, she was planning for the future.
She was looking forward to participating in the many
exciting things.
In her eyes, and in mine, her career was just
beginning....
She had a luminous quality.
A combination of wistfulness, radiance, and yearning
that set her apart and made everyone wish to be part of it - to
share in the childish naivete which was at once so shy and yet so
vibrant.
Personal life
- Marriages
His first marriage was to Nora Krecaun in 1926 until her death
three years later in 1929. In 1934 he married actress and drama
coach
Paula Miller (1909-1966) until
her death from cancer in 1966. They were the parents of actress
Susan Strasberg (1938-99) and acting
teacher
John Strasberg (b. 1941). His
third wife was the former Anna Mizrahi (b. April 16, 1939) and the
mother of his two youngest children, Adam Lee Strasberg and David
Lee Israel Strasberg.
Death and commemoration
On February 17, 1982, Lee Strasberg died from a
heart attack in New York City, aged
80. With him at his death at the hospital were his wife, Anna, and
their two sons.
He was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
. A day before his unexpected death, he was
officially notified that he had been elected to the
American Theatre Hall of Fame.
His last
public appearance was on February 14, 1982 at Night of 100
Stars in the Radio City Music Hall
, a benefit for the Actors
Fund. Along with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, he danced
in the chorus line with the
Rockettes.
Actress
Ellen Burstyn recalled that
evening:
Late in the evening, I wandered into the greenroom and
saw Lee sitting next to Anna, watching the taping on the
monitor.
I sat next to him and we chatted a little.
Lee wasn't one for small talk, so I didn't stay
long.
But before I got up, I said, 'Lee, I've been asked to
run for president of Actors Equity.'
He reached over and patted me on the back, 'That's
wonderful, dahling.
Congratulations.'
Those were the last words he ever said to
me....
Two days later, early in the morning, I was still
asleep when the door to my bedroom opened.
I woke up and saw my friend and assistant, Katherine
Cortez, enter the room and walk toward me....
'We just got a call.
Lee Strasberg died.'
No, no, no, I wailed, over and over.
'I'm not ready', and pulled the covers over my
head.
I had told myself that I must be prepared for this, but
I was not prepared.
What was I to do now?
Who would I work for when I was preparing for a
role?
Who would I go to when I was in
trouble?....
His memorial service was held at the Shubert Theater where A Chorus Line was playing.
Lee's coffin was brought down the aisle and placed
center stage.
Everybody in the theater world came – actors, writers,
directors, producers, and most, if not all, his
students.
He was a giant of the theater and was deeply
mourned.
Those of us who had the great good fortune to be
fertilized and quickened by his genius would feel the loss of him
for the rest of our lives.
In an 80th birthday interview, he said that he was looking forward
to his next 20 years in the theater. According to friends, he was
healthy until the day he died. "It was so unexpected", Al Pacino
said. "What stood out was how youthful he was. He never seemed as
old as his years. He was an inspiration." Actress
Jane Fonda said after hearing of his death, "I'm
not sure I even would have become an actress were it not for him.
He will be missed, but he leaves behind a great legacy."
Legacy
- Influence on American films
"Whether directly influenced by Strasberg or not", wrote acting
author Pamela Wojcik, "the new male stars all to some degree or
other adapted Method techniques to support their identification as
rebels... He recreates romance as a drama of male neuroticism and
also invests his characterization 'with an unprecedented aura of
verisimilitude'." Acting teacher and author Alison Hodge explains:
"Seemingly spontaneous, intuitive, brooding, 'private', lit with
potent vibrations from an inner life of conflict and contradiction,
their work exemplified the style of heightened naturalism which
(whether Brando agrees or not) Lee Strasberg devoted his life to
exploring and promoting."
Pamela Wojcik adds:
Because of their tendency to substitute their personal
feelings for those of the characters they were playing, Actors
Studio performers were well suited to become Hollywood
stars....
In short, Lee Strasberg transformed a socialistic,
egalitarian theory of acting into a celebrity-making
machine....
It does not matter who 'invented' Marlon Brando or how regularly or faithfully
he, Dean, or Clift attended the Studio or studied the Method at the
feet of Lee Strasberg.
In their signature roles – the most influential
performances in the history of American films – these three
performers revealed new kinds of body language and new ways of
delivering dialogue.
In the pauses between words, in the language 'spoken'
by their eyes and faces, they gave psychological realism an
unprecedented charge.
Verbally inarticulate, they were eloquent 'speakers' of
emotion.
Far less protective of their masculinity than earlier
film actors, they enacted emotionally wounded and vulnerable
outsiders struggling for self-understanding, and their work
shimmered with a mercurial neuroticism...
[T]he Method-trained performers in films of the fifties
added an enhanced verbal and gesture naturalism and a more vivid
inner life.
Actors Studio West
In 1966,
Strasberg established Actors Studio West in
Los
Angeles
. In 1969, he founded the
Lee Strasberg Theatre
and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles.
Ellen Burstyn,
Al
Pacino, and
Harvey Keitel lead
this
nonprofit studio dedicated to the
development of actors, playwrights, and directors. In 1974, at the
suggestion of his former student
Al
Pacino, Strasberg acted in a key supporting role alongside
Pacino in
Godfather II and
again in the 1979 film,
And
Justice for All.
Work on Broadway
Note: All works are plays and the original productions unless
otherwise noted.
- Four Walls (1927) - Actor
- The
Vegetable (1929) - Director
- Red Rust (1929) - Actor
- Green Grow the
Lilacs (1931) - Actor
- The House of Connelly (1931)
- Co-Director
- 1931 (1931) - Director
- Success Story (1932) - Director
- Men in White (1933) - Director
- Gentlewoman (1934) - Director
- Gold Eagle Guy (1934) - Director
- Paradise Lost (1935) - Produced by Group Theatre
- Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936) - Director, Produced by
Group Theatre
- Johnny Johnson
(1936) - Director, Produced by Group Theatre
- Many Mansions (1937) - Director
- Golden Boy (1937) -
Produced by Group Theatre
- Roosty (1938) - Director
- Casey Jones (1938) -
Produced by Group Theatre
- All the Living (1938) - Director
- Dance Night (1938) - Director
- Rocket to the Moon (1938) - Produced by Group
Theatre
- The Gentle People (1939) - Produced by Group
Theatre
- Awake and Sing! (1939), revival - Produced by Group Theatre
- Summer Night (1939) - Director
- Night Music (1940) - Produced by Group Theatre
- The Fifth
Column (1940) - Director
- Clash by Night (1941) -
Director
- A Kiss for Cinderella (1942), revival - Director
- R.U.R.
(1942), revival -
Director
- Apology (1943) - Producer and Director
- South Pacific (1943, apparently no
relation to the Broadway
musical
South
Pacific) - Director
- Skipper Next to God (1948) - Director
- The Big Knife (1949) - Director
- The Closing Door (1949) - Director
- The Country Girl (1950) - Co-Producer
- Peer Gynt (1951), (revival) -
Director
- Strange Interlude
(1963), (revival) - Produced by The Actors Studio - Tony Award Co-nomination for Best Producer of a
Play
- Marathon '33 (1963) - Production supervisor
- The Three
Sisters (1964), (revival) - Director, Produced by The
Actors Studio
Film acting credits
See also
References
- The World of the Theatre (1979)
- New York Times Book Review
- Bast, W. Surviving James Dean, Barricade Books
(2006)
- "Sidney Lumet". Encyclopedia of World Biography,
(2004)
- Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life, Da Capo Press (1997)
- Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: A Biography,
HarperCollins (2005)
- Slater, Robert and Elinor. Great Jewish Men, Jonathan
David Company, Inc. (1996)
- The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography, Houghton
Mifflin Reference Books, (2003)
- Buford, Kate. Burt Lancaster: An American Life, DaCapo
Press (2001)
- Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama, Grove Press (1994)
- Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness, Da Capo
Publ. (1984)
- Pacino, Al, and Grobel, Lawrence. Al Pacino: In
Conversation with Lawrence Grobel, Simon and Schuster
(2006)
- Staggs, Sam. "When Blanche Met Brando: the Scandalous Story of
A Streetcar Named Desire", Macmillan (2005), p. 88
- Zolotow,
Maurice. Billy Wilder in Hollywood, Hal Leonard Corp.
(1987)
- "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Screenwriting" Alpha
Books, (2004), p. 56
- Foster, Arnold W., and Blau, Judith R. Art and Society:
Readings in the Sociology of the Arts, State University of New York
Press (1989), pp. 118-19
- Watch videos
- Marilyn Monroe's funeral on YouTube (excerpt)
- Gussow, Mel. "Lee Strasberg of Actors Studio Is Dead"
New York Times, February 18, 1982
- "Lee Strasberg, 'Method' Acting Mentor, Dies at
80", Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1982
- Burstyn, Ellen. Lessons in Becoming Myself, Riverhead
Books (2007)
- Wojcik, Pamela. Movie Acting, the Film Reader: The Film
Reader, Routledge (2004)
- Wojcik, op cit.
- Wojcik, op cit.
- A Timeline of Lee Strasberg
- Lumet, Sidney, and Rapf, Joanna E. Sidney Lumet: Interviews, University of
Mississippi Press, (2006)
External links
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