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Stella!
Mother of Modern Acting
by Sheana Ochoa
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Book Presentation:
Arthur Miller decided to become a playwright after seeing her perform with the Group Theater. Marlon Brando attributed his acting to her genius as a teacher. Theater critic Robert Brustein calls her the greatest acting teacher in America.
At the turn of the 20th century – by which time acting had hardly evolved since classical Greece – Stella Adler became a child star of the Yiddish stage in New York, where she was being groomed to refine acting craft and eventually help pioneer its modern gold standard: method acting. Stella's emphasis on experiencing a role through the actions in the given circumstances of the work directs actors toward a deep sociological understanding of the imagined characters: their social class, geographic upbringing, biography, which enlarges the actor's creative choices.
Always “onstage ” Stella's flamboyant personality disguised a deep sense of not belonging. Her unrealized dream of becoming a movie star chafed against an unflagging commitment to the transformative power of art. From her Depression-era plays with the Group Theatre to freedom fighting during WWII, Stella used her notoriety as a tool for change.
For this book, Sheana Ochoa worked alongside Irene Gilbert, Stella's friend of 30 years, who provided Ochoa with a trove of Stella's personal and pedagogical materials, and Ochoa interviewed Stella's entire living family, including her daughter Ellen; her colleagues and friends, from Arthur Miller to Karl Malden; and her students from Robert De Niro to Mark Ruffalo. Unearthing countless unpublished letters and interviews, private audio recordings, Stella's extensive FBI file, class videos and private audio recordings, Ochoa's biography introduces one of the most under recognized, yet most influential luminaries of the 20th century.
About the Author:
Sheana Ochoa (Los Angeles, CA) writes about theater and is widely published in such outlets as CNN and Salon, in addition to her own arts blog, SLAM. She inaugurated the One-Act Play Festival at the Stella Adler Academy in Hollywood and in 2012 cofounded a new company, Freedom Theatre West, where she coproduced its inaugural play and is currently in production for the 2014 season. She received a master's in professional writing from USC.
Press Reviews:
Thank the lords of acting and writing that Sheana Ochoa has written this biography of one of the greatest broads of the boards of Broadway. (Yes, I hang my head in shame for political incorrectness.) Professionally, her life is a record of several great eras of the American theatre. Her father, Jacob Adler was likely the predominant figure of the Yiddish/Hebrew Theatre that played to houses of 2,000 a night during that genre's heyday in the late 1800s. It was also very much the family business. Stella made her stage debut at the age of three and, along with her brothers and sisters, born of several wives one might add, maintained a significant acting presence all their lives.
When the acting style began to change from, shall we say Sarah Bernhardt-like histrionics to a more natural mode of presentation, was with the founding of the Stanislvski-acolyte Group in 1930. Both Stella and her brother Luther were present at the creation, with Stella's presence a direct result of her long-running and completely unfaithful relationship with the Group s co-founder Harold Clurman.
My other suspicion after finishing and thoroughly enjoying Stella! is that she became a great acting teacher not just to make ends meet in her Park Avenue world, but in order to play before her classes the parts that she felt she should have played as a stage or movie actress. For this is the irony of her career, and also those of Strasberg and Meisner. If all we had to go by in assessing their impact was the list of their performances, attention would not be paid. Stella had good to excellent notices in several plays, most notably John Howard Lawson's Success Story, yet that all faded out by the end of the 1930s. As for Hollywood, she made a few movies under the rather clunky name of Stella Ardler, with Shadow of the Thin Man being the only one you are likely to run across on TCM some late night. Actually, that tells you all you need to know. If Stella had arrived in Hollywood with a star name, Hollywood never would have asked her to change it. And yet, her name still lives and it is deserved that life for her greatness as a teacher. Marlon Brando often played fast and loose with the story of his own life, but he did say that if there were not a Stella there might not have been a him to be heard of. Robert DeNiro took her classes for decades, even though he was never one of her teacher s pets; and the names of Martin Sheen, Sidney Lumet, and Peter Bogdnaovich attest to her mastery. Script first; the play's the thing. And from the quotes Ochoa uses where Stella analyzes a play, a scene, a character, she deserves all the encore curtain calls she can possibly get. This is a must-read biography for lovers of acting and theatre in general. --San Francisco Book Review
The exclamatory title of Sheana Ochoa's biography of legendary acting teacher Stella Adler invokes Marlon Brando's tormented cry in ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' It's a fitting allusion: Brando was Adler's most famous pupil, and his endorsement of her teaching over Lee Strasberg's Method was a crucial victory in the rancorous war between these two American interpreters of Stanislavsky's revolutionary system of acting training. What could Strasberg teach Adler that she hadn't already learned as a girl acting with her nearest and dearest on stage? She was born, as she said, ''into a kingdom,'' a princess of the Yiddish theater. To her temperamental mind, Strasberg was an interloper preaching a psychological technique that wasn't only impractical but injurious to the longevity of a performer.
After studying firsthand with Stanislavsky in Paris, Adler contended that Strasberg had badly misinterpreted the Russian master. She returned to the Group Theatre with an urgent corrective: The actor must imaginatively enter the circumstance of the play, concentrating on the acti --Los Angeles Times
''Dustin Hoffman famously tells the story that he prepared for a torture scene in 'Marathon Men' by going without sleep for three days so he would look properly spent in front of the camera. 'Next time,' Hoffman's co-star, Laurence Olivier, advised, 'try acting.' Exactly here we can see a generational clash between the traditional acting style of an earlier era and 'method' acting, a phenomenon that is explored in intimate detail by theater writer Sheana Ochoa in Stella! Mother of Modern Acting (Applause). Although the life story of legendary acting instructor Stella Adler is a saga worthy of the screen, full of color and conflict, Adler is best remembered for having trained and inspired several generations of acting luminaries, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Benicio del Toro . . . As it happened, making a living by mentoring young actors turned Adler into a legendary figure of enduring importance in American theater and film. Thanks to the artistry and scholarship of Ochoa, however, she is even more fascinating as a woman of flesh and blood.'' --Jewish Journal
See the publisher website: Applause Books
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