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Lee Strasberg was one of the leading acting teachers in America and was particularly associated with a certain style of acting that would dominate the American stage after World War II. Strasberg was little known to most of the world except as the guru of Method Acting until he appeared in a prominent role in the film Godfather II, but many of his students were very well known to the public at large, among them John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Dustin Hoffman.
American Method Acting actually started in Russia with Konstantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater, opened in 1898. Stanislavski wrote about his approach to acting in An Actor Prepares, published in Russia in 1926 and in the United States in 1936. ... Two of the American actors who learned this approach were Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and in 1931 both were founding members of the Group Theatre, the first ensemble troupe in America and the first theatrical organization to espouse the Stanislavski system, the Americanized version of which is known as "the Method." Under Strasberg and the first Method school for professional actors, the Actors Studio, the Method was established as the preeminent acting style for American actors.
Strasberg has written about his life, his early years in the theater, and the development of the Method. ... This was in an era still considered the golden age of acting, and among the performers he saw were Eleanora Duse, Giovanni Grasso, Laurette Taylor, Eva Le Gallienne, Jeanne Eagels, and Walter Hampden:
I do not know how, but even at that time I possessed a good observation and awareness of acting. ...
It was at the Laboratory Theatre where Strasberg absorbed most of his ideas about acting that would lead to the development of the Method. ... Strasberg directed the first production of the Group Theatre, Paul Greens House of Connelly, and also undertook the training of the actors based on his interpretation of the Stanislavsky method as learned from Boleslavsky as well as from the writings of Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov.
Approximate Word count = 1596
Approximate Pages = 6.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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