Lee Strasberg

Based on Wikipedia: Lee Strasberg

The Man Who Taught Hollywood How to Feel

In 1923, a twenty-two-year-old shipping clerk who made hairpieces for a living walked into a New York theater and had his life turned inside out. The Moscow Art Theatre was visiting America, and Lee Strasberg—born Israel Strassberg in a small village that was then part of Austria-Hungary and is now Ukraine—watched actors do something he had never seen before. They weren't performing. They were being.

This moment would ripple forward through the entire twentieth century.

Within decades, the techniques Strasberg developed from what he witnessed that night would shape the performances of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and virtually every actor you've ever watched lose themselves in a role so completely that you forgot you were watching a performance at all.

From Tragedy to Obsession

Strasberg's path to that revelatory night in the theater was paved with loss. He arrived in America in 1909, when he was just seven years old. His father had emigrated first, working as a presser in New York's garment industry, slowly saving enough money to bring the rest of the family over from their village one by one. They settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a neighborhood teeming with immigrants reinventing themselves in the new world.

The young Strasberg was a voracious reader and a straight-A student, seemingly destined for conventional success. Then the 1918 influenza pandemic—which killed more people than World War One—took his older brother Zalmon. The grief was so devastating that Strasberg dropped out of high school entirely.

What does a brilliant, traumatized young man do when the conventional path collapses? He finds his own way. A relative gave Strasberg a small role in a Yiddish-language production. He joined a settlement house drama club. Philip Loeb, the casting director of the prestigious Theater Guild, noticed something in him—some quality of presence, some hint of depth—even though Strasberg wasn't yet thinking of acting as a career.

He was still making wigs and keeping books.

What He Saw That Night

When Konstantin Stanislavski brought his Moscow Art Theatre to America in 1923, Strasberg experienced what can only be described as a conversion. He had seen good acting before, certainly. But this was different. These Russian actors weren't competing with each other for attention. They weren't striking poses or thinking about their dinner reservations. Every single one of them—whether playing the lead or a servant with three lines—worked with the same complete commitment.

More importantly, each actor seemed to project what Strasberg would later call an "inner life" for their character. Something unspoken but completely palpable. American theater at the time emphasized external technique: how you stood, how you projected your voice, how you hit your marks. The Moscow Art Theatre emphasized something internal: who you were in that moment on stage.

Strasberg looked at himself honestly. He was slight and, by his own assessment, not handsome. His future as a leading man was limited. But as a theoretician and teacher of this new approach? He saw his destiny.

The Method, Explained

So what exactly did Strasberg develop, and why did it matter so much?

Before Method acting, most American performers learned their craft through imitation and technique. You watched experienced actors and copied their gestures. You learned how to cry on cue by thinking about dead puppies. You projected emotions outward through established physical signals—a furrowed brow for concern, a clenched fist for anger. The audience understood these conventions, and everyone more or less agreed that this was what acting looked like.

Strasberg flipped this inside out.

He taught actors to work with what he called "affective memory"—the practice of drawing on real emotions from their own lives to fuel their performances. If you need to play grief on stage, you don't pretend to be sad. You remember a time when you actually experienced loss. You access that emotion from within your own psychological history and let it flow through you into the character.

This might sound obvious now, but it was revolutionary. It meant that actors weren't manufacturing feelings; they were experiencing them. The audience could sense the difference, even if they couldn't articulate why one performance felt more "real" than another.

The training went beyond emotional recall. Strasberg developed exercises in relaxation and concentration. Actors worked with invisible objects, building their capacity to imagine things that weren't there—a skill that would prove particularly valuable when film started using more special effects and green screens. They learned to exist fully in imaginary circumstances until those circumstances became, in some important sense, real to them.

The Group Theatre: America's First True Collective

In 1931, Strasberg joined forces with theater directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford to create something unprecedented in American theater. They called it the Group Theatre, and it operated as a genuine collective—a company of actors, directors, and playwrights who lived, worked, and often starved together in pursuit of a shared artistic vision.

The Group Theatre emerged during the Great Depression, and its work reflected that moment. These weren't escapist entertainments. They staged plays that confronted social and moral issues, that connected theater to "the world of ideas and actions." Playwright Arthur Miller, who would later write Death of a Salesman, said the Group Theatre was "literally the voice of Depression America" and predicted it would never be repeated.

The collective offered something radical: tuition-free scholarships for promising students. They spent summers together at country clubs in Connecticut, workshopping and developing their craft. Harold Clurman described what Strasberg brought to their work:

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 classic hush, tense and tragic.

But collectives are difficult. Egos clashed. Love affairs tangled. Feuds exploded. By 1937, amid what one historian diplomatically called "internecine tensions," Strasberg resigned as director.

The Actors Studio: The Most Exclusive Acting School in America

Ten years later, in 1947, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford founded the Actors Studio as a nonprofit workshop where professional actors could continue developing their craft away from commercial pressures. In 1951, Strasberg took over as artistic director, and the Studio became legendary.

The exclusivity was almost comical. More than a thousand actors auditioned each year. The directors typically admitted five or six.

Jack Nicholson auditioned five times before he got in. Dustin Hoffman auditioned six times. Harvey Keitel auditioned eleven times. After each rejection, a candidate had to wait a year before trying again. One year, out of two thousand candidates, exactly two were admitted: Martin Landau and Steve McQueen.

Strasberg was unapologetically demanding. "At the studio, we do not sit around and feed each other's egos," he wrote. "People are shocked how severe we are on each other." The Studio maintained a strict off-limits-to-outsiders policy and guarded its privacy fiercely. It became, in the words of one observer, "a refuge" where actors could "meet the enemy within."

That enemy was their own emotional barriers—their hesitation, their self-consciousness, their tendency to perform emotions rather than actually feel them.

The Roster of Legends

The list of actors who trained at the Actors Studio reads like a roll call of mid-century American cinema: Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Geraldine Page, Anne Bancroft, Patricia Neal, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint, Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Sidney Poitier, Karl Malden, Gene Wilder, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, Sally Field.

Al Pacino, who would later convince Strasberg to act alongside him in The Godfather Part II, credited the Studio with launching his career. "Lee Strasberg hasn't been given the credit he deserves," Pacino said. "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."

James Dean, at just twenty-one years old, wrote to his family about being admitted: "It houses great people like Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy. Very few get into it. It's the best thing that can happen to an actor. I'm one of the youngest to belong."

Marilyn Monroe became what one author called "a disciple of Lee Strasberg." Between The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, she transformed herself through serious study at the Studio, reading good books, working on her craft. The breathy blonde bombshell was determined to be taken seriously as an actress, and Strasberg was her guide.

The Complicated Case of Marlon Brando

And then there was Brando.

Marlon Brando is often cited as the ultimate Method actor, the "hot, sleek engine on the Actors Studio express," the living embodiment of everything Strasberg taught. He famously said: "The Method made me a real actor. The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life 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."

But here's the complication: Brando wasn't primarily trained by Strasberg.

His main teacher was Stella Adler, a former member of the Group Theatre who had a fundamental falling out with Strasberg over his interpretations of Stanislavski's ideas. Adler believed Strasberg had misunderstood the Russian master, that his emphasis on emotional memory could be psychologically damaging to actors. She developed her own approach, focusing more on imagination and given circumstances than on dredging up personal trauma.

In his autobiography, Brando was characteristically blunt: "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."

Brando admitted he sometimes attended the Actors Studio on Saturday mornings, but mainly because Elia Kazan was teaching and "there were usually a lot of good-looking girls there."

This dispute—Strasberg versus Adler, different interpretations of the same Russian source material—would simmer for decades. Both teachers produced extraordinary actors. The question of who really understood Stanislavski became almost theological in acting circles.

The Teacher Becomes an Actor

For most of his life, Strasberg was known exclusively as a teacher and theoretician. He had largely given up on his own performing career decades earlier. But in 1974, at the age of seventy-two, he was offered a role that would earn him an Academy Award nomination.

Al Pacino was making The Godfather Part II and suggested Strasberg for the role of Hyman Roth, a powerful gangster loosely based on the real-life mobster Meyer Lansky. The role had originally been offered to Elia Kazan—Strasberg's old colleague from the Group Theatre days—but Kazan turned it down.

So the man who had spent fifty years teaching others how to act stepped in front of the camera himself. He played Roth as a quiet, calculating businessman, outwardly mild but inwardly ruthless. The performance earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

It's a strange and wonderful irony: the teacher who told countless students to access their authentic emotions finally demonstrated, in his seventies, what that looked like in practice.

The Later Years and the Institute

By 1970, Strasberg had become less involved with the Actors Studio. With his third wife, Anna, he opened the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, with branches in both New York City and Hollywood. The Institute was explicitly commercial in a way the nonprofit Actors Studio was not—Strasberg was now teaching anyone who could pay, not just the select few who survived the brutal audition process.

Some saw this as a democratization of his methods. Others saw it as a dilution. The Actors Studio maintained its legendary exclusivity while the Institute trained paying students in the same techniques.

Strasberg continued teaching until his death in February 1982, at the age of eighty. He had spent more than sixty years thinking about, writing about, and demonstrating how actors could access authentic emotion—how they could stop pretending and start being.

The Controversy That Never Ended

Was Strasberg a visionary who transformed American performance? Or was he an egotist who took credit for others' achievements and potentially damaged actors by forcing them to relive personal trauma?

The truth, as usual, is complicated.

His techniques undeniably produced remarkable performances. Something happened in American acting in the mid-twentieth century—a shift toward greater naturalism, greater psychological depth, greater emotional authenticity. Strasberg was at the center of that shift, even if he wasn't its only cause.

At the same time, his emphasis on emotional memory troubled many. Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner, both of whom developed their own influential approaches to actor training, believed that constantly excavating personal trauma could harm performers psychologically. They argued that Stanislavski himself had moved away from affective memory in his later work, and that Strasberg was clinging to an earlier, superseded technique.

The debate continues today in acting schools around the world. Is it better to remember a time you actually felt devastated, or to imagine so vividly a fictional circumstance that the devastation becomes real without needing personal fuel? Both approaches work. Both have produced great actors. The argument about which is superior—or safer—may never be resolved.

What the Method Changed

Before Strasberg and the actors he trained, movie stars were often glamorous figures who played variations of themselves. They were types: the tough guy, the seductress, the comic relief. They had presence and charisma, but they weren't necessarily disappearing into roles.

After Strasberg, something shifted. Actors began transforming themselves so completely that audiences sometimes failed to recognize them from film to film. Robert De Niro gained sixty pounds to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Dustin Hoffman stayed awake for days to achieve the exhausted look his character needed in Marathon Man. Daniel Day-Lewis—a later practitioner of extreme Method techniques—stayed in character as a paralyzed man throughout the entire production of My Left Foot, requiring crew members to carry him around set.

You can draw a straight line from Strasberg's teachings to these transformations. The idea that an actor should become the character—not just perform the character—traces back to what Strasberg saw that night in 1923 and spent the next sixty years codifying and teaching.

The Immigrant's Gift

There's something poignant about Strasberg's story that goes beyond acting technique. Here was a boy from a tiny village in what is now Ukraine, traumatized by the death of his brother, dropped out of high school, working in the wig trade. He watched Russian actors perform and understood something that would reshape American culture.

He became a naturalized American citizen in 1939, just as Europe was sliding into catastrophe. The techniques he developed and taught became, in some sense, distinctly American—this emphasis on individual psychological truth, this mining of personal experience, this insistence that authentic emotion mattered more than polished technique.

Tennessee Williams, whose plays A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof became showcases for Method actors, understood what Strasberg's students brought to his work. "They act from the inside out," Williams said. "They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life."

That sense of life—the feeling that you're watching real human beings rather than performers hitting their marks—remains Strasberg's enduring gift to American entertainment. Whether you're watching a prestige drama on streaming television or a superhero movie in IMAX, the acting you see has been shaped, directly or indirectly, by the techniques he developed.

The shipping clerk who made wigs taught Hollywood how to feel.