Stella Adler Technique: Life and Legacy of the Acting Teacher

Born in the United States, Stella Adler was an actress and acting teacher who spent her life promoting the art of acting. Here is a brief overview of her life:

• Early life: Stella Adler was born in Manhattan’s Lower East Side into a family of entertainers. Her parents, Jacob P. Adler and Sara Adler, performed in the Yiddish theater, and she had five actor siblings (Jay, Florence, Julia, Frances, and Luther Adler). Adler appeared in her first play, Broken Hearts, at age four. She worked alongside her parents in a number of other roles in her youth. Due to her busy schedule, she didn’t have too much time for school, but she did attend New York University. As a young woman, she also performed on Broadway and vaudeville.
• Group Theatre: In 1931, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, and Harold Clurman created the Group Theatre in New York and invited Adler to join. (Early Group Theatre figures also included Sanford Meisner, another notable name in the world of acting.) This group favored a highly naturalistic and disciplined approach to acting; they encouraged their acolytes to inhabit the world and head of a character authentically. During her time with the theater, Adler appeared in John onward Lawson’s Success Story and two Clifford Odets plays: Paradise Lost and Awake and Sing!
• Move to Hollywood: Adler moved to Hollywood in the late thirties and appeared in several feature films under the name Stella Ardler. She acted in the films Love on Toast (1937), The Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), and My Girl Tisa (1948) while also working as an associate producer for MGM. Adler returned to New York City in the late 1940s, where she continued to act and teach—primarily at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research. In 1949, she opened the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting (later the Stella Adler Studio of Acting). She later opened a west coast branch of her acting school in California, called the Art of Acting Studio Los Angeles.
• Teaching legacy: Stella taught many famous names throughout her career, including Marlon Brando, Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Martin Sheen, Mark Ruffalo, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Elaine Stritch, and Warren Beatty. In the 1960s, Adler taught at the Yale School of Drama, and her studio later became the first professional acting studio associated with NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Adler also founded the Stella Adler Academy of Acting & Theatre in Los Angeles in 1985 alongside Joanne Linville and Irene Gilbert. She retired from acting by the 1960s but continued to teach for a number of years.

The Stella Adler technique focuses on imagining the world of the character, rather than the commonly taught technique of conjuring details from personal memory or emotion. Actors may sometimes need to rely on their own emotional memories using the Adler technique, but her approach focuses more on the sociological aspects of the performance.

Actors training in the Stella Adler technique learn about the conditions of the character they’re portraying: what their life might be like, what their profession entailed, and so forth. This requires the actor to incorporate imagination, research, and creative actions to build the fictional role.

Adler’s technique also relies on being able to glean the right details from a text and the well-being of the performer themselves. Ailments or physical pains can detrimentally affect their performance, so the actor should focus all their efforts on maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

The Stella Adler technique comes from the acting philosophy and teaching methods of Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski. His acting system encourages actors to create an emotionally expressive and authentic performance through extensive preparation and rehearsal. Actors internalize their character’s inner life, including their motivations and emotional states.

1. 1. Stanislavski’s US tour: Between 1922 and 1923, Stanislavski toured the United States with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler attended one of the performances and found herself forever changed.
2. 2. Adler and the American Laboratory Theatre: In 1925, Adler joined the American Laboratory Theatre, where she studied Stanislavski’s system. She learned from two former members of the Moscow Art Theatre: Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. Adler notably disagreed with her Group Theatre peer Lee Strasberg on some of Stanislavski’s principles, mainly the use of the actor’s imagination (which Adler encouraged) versus using their own experiences through “affective memory” (which Strasberg prioritized).
3. 3. Working with Stanislavski: In 1934, Adler took a five-week intensive with Stanislavski. She confirmed that he had shifted his method to focus more on imagination, further bolstering her belief in its importance in acting technique. She continued to perform occasionally with the Group Theatre until 1941 but ultimately broke away from Strasberg and the rest of the group due to fundamental differences in theories. She formed her own school in 1949.

The Stella Adler technique is a unique method that differs from many other acting methods. Some key components of the Stella Adler technique include:

• Attention to detail. Adler’s technique involves paying close attention to the minutiae of everyday life that the actor can use to more realistically imagine themselves in the character’s world. This theory contradicted the Meisner technique, which requires the actor to focus more on personally relatable feelings and behaviors to draw out their performance. Strasberg’s approach focused heavily on personal emotional memory to create a role and deeply inhabit a character through method acting—a type of acting that pushes actors into near unity with the characters they play on-screen or on-stage. Adler believed this approach compromised the health of the actor and vehemently opposed it.
• Analyzing the text. The Adler technique emphasizes careful script analysis. Along with giving more respect to the playwright or screenwriter, this technique draws from the details provided to form an accurate, rounded character. The more details you can glean from the text, the more life you give the character. This differs from the Meisner technique, which prioritizes instinct and the truthfulness of how the scene would really play out over textual analysis.
• Healthy cultivation of the mind and body. Adler believed that the more educated and informed the performer, the better the performance. Becoming a student of the world by researching history, cultures, and languages were all ways for an actor to elevate their performance. Keeping the body in good physical health was also important. The Strasberg technique focused heavily on method acting, sometimes to the detriment of the performer’s health. Actors would suffer physical and emotional distress to their own bodies with the goal of attaining a particular look or tone for a character, and Adler deeply disagreed with this approach because it compromised the actor’s health.
• Emphasis on actions. Adler’s method focuses more on a character’s actions rather than their feelings. Actions provide the “why” and the justification of a character’s behavior, which evoke feelings. Other techniques, such as Meiser and Strasberg, seemed to draw from and project deep emotions as their central focus.

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