Product Description

Stella Adler was one of the 20th Century's greatest figures. She is arguably the most important teacher of acting in American history. Over her long career, both in New York and Hollywood, she offered her vast acting knowledge to generations of actors, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. The great voice finally ended in the early Nineties, but her decades of experience and teaching have been brilliantly caught and encapsulated by Howard Kissel in the twenty-two lessons in this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35808 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 275 pages

From Library Journal
This second collection of Adler's papers precedes the material found in the previous collection (Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekov, LJ 4/15/99), ending as she begins text analysis. Here Kissel (David Merrick) has taken tapes, transcriptions, notebooks, and other sources to reconstruct an acting course in 22 lessons. What results is Adler at her strongest. Coming from a theatrical family and having studied with Stanislavsky, she became an old-fashioned autocratic teacher determined to pass on the best that she knows. She was certainly the best of her generation. The lessons are graduated from very basic matters to quite complex issues of textual analysis and decorum. Though mostly monologs, they include enough exercises and student responses to get the flavor of Adler's work. Some themes run through these classes: American culture is bankrupt, Lee Strasberg got Stanislavsky wrong, and class and its formality must be learned in order to do major plays through the realist period. This is required reading for anyone interested in theater practice.DThomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
When Adler died in 1992, the theater lost a great teacher, whose depth of experience alone made her invaluable. Daughter of one of the greats of Yiddish theater, Jacob Adler, she studied with Stanislavski, was a founder of the Group Theater and appeared in many of its seminal productions, married the brilliant critic Harold Clurman (they later divorced), and after the Group Theater folded, founded an acting school that rivaled Lee Strasberg's. But she never wrote a book about her theories and techniques. This collection, culled from sound recordings of her at work, at least re-creates the feel of her classes. Editor Kissel deserves great credit for shaping what could have been a chaotic collage of pronouncements into a coherent whole. The book's 22 lively chapters detail Adler's techniques for preparing her students for a life on the stage. Theater aficionados will appreciate Adler's discussion of modern plays and her belief that acting is a rare, privileged profession, and young actors will benefit from the many acting exercises sprinkled throughout the text. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

she is amazing
i got this book to help me in my acting classes. I started reading it and i had a highlighter whith which i was planning to underline all the important stuff. Well i ccould not stop highlighting; every single paragraph in this book is pure genius. I already started developing as an actress more efficiently and faster than i used to, i wish i met her before she died...

the only criticism...she is too abrupt. She is harsh with you. even if she does not kknow you personally, she stil attacks the young actor. this can be rude, but her directions are always right. If u are an actor, you NEED this book. Acting teachers should read it too. I had some horrible teachers in my life

Not Just For Actors
This is one of the best books I read in 2006. It was recommended to me by a professional speaker who promised that the insights in the book were useful to not just professional actors, but rang true for any profession. He was right, this is a must read for business professionals, as well as the actors.

I read it with vigor and was thrilled to see the wisdom in each paragraph. I have recommended this book to friends who have thanked me for linking them up with this amazing publication.

If you are considering reading this book, just do it.

An amazing book about an amazing woman. A++++
This is going to the top of the "books my kids must read" when they are going off to college or leaving home. This book is a supposedly a series of Stella Adler's lectures about acting, but it is also very inspirational as a series of lectures about how to live.

Addler says that "The whole thing about acting is to give. The actor must above everything be generous. He doesn't hoard his riches...But before you can be giving and magnanimous, you must have something to give. Ideas don't come from your legs. They don't come from your voice. They come from your mind. The theatre is built on developing your mind. It's an education for your mind."

She works on critical seeing, self-awareness, discipline, self-control - skills that are important to everyone, not just actors. She discusses the importance of developing your imagination, "Eventually your imaginative reach will extend to other things, until you can say, I know how it feels to be in mourning, how it feels to be isolated, what it means to be abandoned, what it's like to be engaged or to be married." She means this in the context of acting on stage, but for the non-actor, it translates into becoming truly empathetic, to being able to truly understand and communicate with others.

Every page is full of memorable comments:

"You must be aware that even a subject of profound importance can be trivialized and degraded if you haven't the energy and interest to match it."

"Sometimes, when a husband and a wife go on a trip together, he might say, "My God! Do you know what that is? Why that's Notre Dame!" and she replies, "Yes I know. I can see it." They are seeing in Notre Dame something entirely different. As actors you must make everything you see come alive."

"You will fail. That's great. Here's a secret for you - that's the only way you can learn. Learning has to cost you something."

And on and on and on! She must have been such a strong, amazing woman, so completely different from anyone in my own solidly suburban middle class life. It is profoundly uplifting to hear her voice through the pages of this book. I highly, highly recommend this book.