“The definitive source book on acting.”— Los Angeles Times
Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Marilyn Monroe, and Joanne Woodward—these are only a few of the many actors training in “Method” acting by the great and legendary Lee Strasberg. This revolutionary theory of acting—developed by Stanislavski and continued by Strasberg—has been a major influence on the art of acting in our time. During his last decade, Strasberg devoted himself to a work that would explain once and for all what The Method was and how it worked, as well as telling the story of its development and of the people involved with it. The result is a masterpiece of wisdom and guidance for anyone involved with the theater in any way.
“A must for young actors—for old ones, too, for that matter.”— Paul Newman
“An exploration of the creative process that will reward all who are interested in the nature of inspiration.”— Library Journal
Lee Strasberg was an Academy Award nominated Austro-Hungarian-American director, actor, producer, and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective." In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school." In 1969, Strasberg founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood to teach the work he pioneered.
He is considered the "father of method acting in America," according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 "he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies." From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.
While Lee Strasberg and 'Method Acting' have indelibly left a legacy for good reason, acting is a subjective art with no one approach. Like all art forms then, it is difficult to divulge the talent beyond classical technique. However, this book ably inspires and instructs us as actors to focus on relaxation, empathy and analysis of the reality of the writer's constructs. Strasberg's overlying quest is to direct real emotional responses provoked from personal experiences into the actors performances.
With emphasis on reaching authentic emotion via exercises of stimulation, the exercises and psychological explanations are incredibly insightful, but the conclusions he draws are not always as objectively true as he ascertains, as many of my fellow actors might agree on. Indeed, the book's enlightening didacticism is let down by Strasberg's rigid dismissal of many other methods with only his personal experience as evidence; what doesn't work for one person may ultimately work for another. Still an incredibly educational read, and would recommend to all actors!
This is worth reading if you want to be able to correct people when they misuse the term "Method acting." That refers only and exclusively to Strasberg. People abuse the term and the exercises all the time, but this book articulates their specific natures well. It doesn't teach you Method acting, though. This is a history of its development.
I have always been more of a fan of the Meisner technique but this written look into where and how The Method and emotional recall came to be is really quite interesting!
a VERY slow read i’m a pretty fast reader but this was hard to get through. took me an hour to read 20 pages i kept having to put it down because i had to put so much energy into trying to get through it. if it wasn’t a book i had to read for school and if it didn’t have a set deadline that i had to finish reading it by i don’t think i ever would have finished it. that being said it is very interesting and absolutely overflowing with wisdom from a very accomplished well versed man of theatre he shares a lot great information and i loved his short stories about the actors he worked with. just like the cover says every actor old and young should read this book. what i think the book does and what it’s trying to do is give perspective and provide the actor with possible answers to their struggles and the tools to solves those problems. it urges the actor to look to themselves and evaluate where they are in their process.
Probably the most important text on the subject of Method acting. A combination biography of Stanislavsky, some of his contemporaries and followers, history of Method acting, and the various theaters which gave birth or contributed to the development of thereof, as well as autobiography of Strasberg. If one simply wants to understand the theory and practice of Method acting, one could easily skip ahead to the chapter entitled "Fruits Of The Voyage". I dabbled in Performance Art for a while, and if this book taught me nothing else, I now know why I'd occasionally see certain people walking around during a rehearsal shouting "HAH"!
Interesting read. It shows as much about Lee Strasberg as a person as it does about him as an actor or a director. I'm still not a huge fan of method acting, but some of the techniques in this book might help my students think about character and motivation.
one of the best books on acting. great for anyone wanting to know where Marilyn Monroe or Robert Denero learned from. a perfect beginning into the world of method acting.
Have you ever started a book and for whatever reasons finished it decades later? Surely other readers old enough must have experienced this too, no?
This was a book I picked up in San Francisco in the early aughts at the now deposed Borders Books on Union Square, at Post and Powell to be precise, a lovely and always packed bookshop with a humming cafe on the second floor that I spent countless hours and dollars in, now a casualty of the digital age, thanks Amazon.
I stumbled upon the book and having a passing interest in The Method combined with a few auditions here and there decided that it might be a worthwhile thing to delve into.
As my twenties drew to a close, I packed away my boxes of books and junk shop knickknacks along with my assorted youthful pursuits and romantic notions and locked them away in a storage space down on Mission street. I made several hungover trips down there, bleary-eyed and dark-circled, sweaty in the blazing California sun, carting and schlepping my life away, storing more stuff than future wisdom would counsel, not to return for a full five years to that dusty time capsule. Whatever my twenties had been, whatever vague longings and aches and strivings and breakthroughs and endlessly debauched nights I had endured and achieved during those Wander Years, it was over now, sealed up in a dark quiet space for future rumination, and Lee Strasberg’s ‘A Dream of Passion,’ for better or worse, was in there with it all.
So was the book any good, you might be wondering?
Not bad. I should say at the outset—or should have said at an even earlier outset—that I am not an actor (nothing much came of those erstwhile auditions that fell into my lap), and that actors might find some of this book’s exercises and activities more useful than I did.
The parts I did find interesting had to do with the psychological grapplings with the nature of emotion: How are emotions stimulated? What takes place physiologically? Where are emotions localized? How are they expressed? etc.
The starkly meditative aspects of acting surprised me to some degree. The centrality of relaxation to the craft, the way relaxation sets the stage (no pun) for good concentration, how concentration is the key to the imagination. Strasberg states, ‘the talent of the actor functions only to the extent that his concentration is trained.’ And the more relaxed one is the better she can concentrate. These ideas will be familiar to anyone who has spent even just ten minutes in a guided meditation.
Naturally as a book geek I also loved the part on the ‘objective correlative’, which I didn’t know or had forgotten was used by T.S. Elliot for his reflections on creativity in his essay, ‘The Problems of Hamlet’. (Though the phrase is most commonly associated with Elliot he apparently borrowed it from the painter Washington Allston). Elliot’s description of the O.C. is rather autocratic in terms of creating emotion in art, but his quote is still notable: ‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’
Strasberg connects this to the method actor’s affective memory technique in that he must find an objective correlative from his own experiences to help him express the emotions his character needs at different moments.
In a late section on Bertolt Brecht, Strasberg is poignantly reverential towards the pioneering work of the late great man and takes a good deal of pride in the idea that Brecht enjoyed their semi-collaborations in rehearsals, and that it was Strasberg alone who understood and could see the true intent behind Brecht’s techniques and how they were influenced by Stanislavski’s Method. This part of the book could grate harder were it not for Strasberg’s clear admiration and adoration of Brecht and his work, in particular the play, ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle,’ which Strasberg refers to as ‘among the half dozen outstanding experiences of my life.’
More importantly for our purposes in that section we learn of Brecht’s use of the ‘alienation effect’, essentially a distancing technique that adds depth and complexity to a play in which the audience is conflicted about or unable to form sympathy with the central character(s) due to their words, action, behaviors, etc.
A memorable passage discussing artists’ heightened capacity for sensory and emotional recall uses Proust’s immortal madeleine and the way its taste conjures up a lost world of youth as its prime example. In his ruminations on the difficulty of recovering our emotional memories and past selves, Proust writes, ‘The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation the object will give us), which we do not expect.’
Indeed, sometimes the random object might even be a musty old paperback found in the bottom of a cardboard box that had been locked away in San Francisco many years ago; and holding the book and feeling its particular heft and turning its pages and seeing its shiny red and lavender cover could even transport a middle-age man back to his high and hungover twenties, a time of being listless and lost, yes, but blessed with the freedom and the sweet ache of youth too.
homie lovvveeedd stanislavsky definitely interesting, especially how there’s all the confusion between what being a “method actor” is and what strasberg’s “method” was actually talking about
I started reading this for acting class, but i find that some of the ideas are useful far beyond that. A book that makes you think. If you have interest in acting, a must.
Brando has a few sharp words about Lee Strasberg and how 'little' he was in his orbit
and how it was others Brando learned from.....
Strasberg might have had the ego of the Hindenburg, but he did teach a lot of other actors too, in his own way, but take him with a grain of salt...
......
James Grissom
"I never met Lee Strasberg, and I did not want the book to be an attack on the man, so I sought balancing opinions from others. One of the most forthcoming was Marlon Brando, who admitted the man's faults, but who also trumpeted his indisputable gifts and contributions."
In one of my interviews with Kim Stanley, she was particularly hard on Strasberg, and I read her comments to Brando by telephone.
......
This is his full response:
Brando: Kim is entitled to her opinion of Lee, no matter how often it shifts. We are entitled to feel as we do and as we must, but let us remember that I honor and adore, ust to name two actors, Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn, and they both state, not to me, but publiclym that Lee Strasberg is responsible for their growth as actors. I trust and honor those two people, and I trust their word. I could name you a hundred people, easily, who feel the same way, so my feeling is that what we'll call the Lee Strasberg Argument needs to find some balance, some contours.
Lee Strasberg impressed me, but he did not shape or alter me as an actor: I have told you and I have told many that Stella [Adler] may take blame or responsibility for the good work that I may have done. Nonetheless, what Tennessee himself calls the 'kinetic nest' that was the Actors Studio is the result of work done by [Harold] Clurman, Bobby [Lewis], Cheryl Crawford, Gadge [Kazan], and Lee, and it was Lee who remained and kept the nest operating and humming and producing actors and writers. The nest also produced people who might not have remained in the professional theatre, but who remained fervent lovers of good acting and good theatre. We cannot dismiss that.
Whatever else may be said about Lee, he allowed a great number of actors to trust themselves and to feel comfortable to grow as artists. That is a huge statement, but I find it dismissed as light praise. I found this comfort and this inspiration from Stella, and others found it with [Sanford] Meisner or Herbert [Berghof]. Another group loved Mira Rostova. Listen, a lot of people don't get the message of Jesus, but they thrive on the words of Buddha or Confucius. That has to be honored. No one is wrong. We all thrive on that which we thrive, and Lee was a great teacher to a great number of people.
Theoretically very interesting, but it's too bad this book doesn't have more practical advice, as those sections are by far the most engaging and useful. It's surprising that for a man who shaped acting in America, Strasberg is so intellectual. You can understand the common criticism against his method as being too "inward."
Emotional memory is an interesting concept, though I wonder why Strasberg is so tied down to recall (even though Stanislavsky eventually moved on from this concept) and does not emphasize imagination as much. He pays lip service to it here and there, but it seems to be less essential to his method.
He does a good job of outlining some of the key problems for actors. However, because he doesn't illustrate with enough examples from his own classes, it's hard to get a crystal clear picture of his solutions. They remain conceptual for the most part, when showing us the meat and potatoes of his process would have done more to make these concepts live. Meisner's book, by contrast, is much more effective because it's based on transcriptions of real classes.
That being said, it's still a worthwhile book with some nuggets of wisdom. I thought this anecdote about Stanislavsky was particularly hilarious and also very true to the life of any artist:
"Even in his earliest acting experiences, Stanislavsky was aware of the problems of inspiration I had already observed in the performances of many great actors. He described an early experience in great detail in his autobiography, My Life in Art. At the age of fourteen, he performed in a small theatre his father had built on the family's country estate in Lyubimovka. He recalled his sensations while waiting for the play to begin. When he finally got on the stage, his heart thumped. Something inside of him drove him on, inspired him, and he rushed through the whole play. Words and gestures flew out of him with amazing rapidity. His breath failed him, he could hardly utter the words of his part, and he mistook his 'nervousness and lack of restraint...for true inspiration.' He was convinced that the audience was entirely in his power. At the end of the play he was surprised to find that the other actors avoided him. His performance had been a failure, although he himself had felt a real satisfaction in what he was doing on the stage."
Задълбочено и в същия момент отличаващо се с лекотата на дзен търсене на причината за верните действия - актьорството. Методът - звучи страшно, тихо и лудо. Това са емоциите, които с постоянство дълбаят личността на актьора. Историята на тази книга започва с настояването на съпругата на Страсбърг Ана той да записва развитието на идеите си. Езикът според мен не е сложен и това прави идеята на Страсбърг още по-искрена. Страсбърг пише за себе си съвсем малко и всеки чувствителен читател би останал впечатлен от акцента в живота на Страсбърг, а именно трескавия интерес към изкуството и човека. Този интерес идва, за да утвърди новото изкуство, новата психология, т.е. новата лудост, започната може би от личности като Шекспир, Дидро и достойно доразвита от Московския художествен театър. В прозренията си Страсбърг и Станиславски са истински, защото не са просто теоретици, а търсят и в думите, и в действията. Тази книга е за онези, които ще могат да си я препрочитат дори тогава, когато не я държат :)
Los libros de directores de teatro son hit. Sin embargo, siempre lo son unos más que otros. A Strasberg le falta todavía una escritura mucho más vívida y fluida, que no reitere tanto para dar cuenta de la puesta a prueba del sistema de Stanislavski. Es muy distinto ver un documental en el que Strasberg realiza los ejercicios de relajación y de memoria afectiva con los actores y comparar esa experiencia con las palabras aquí escritas. Hay un abismo que no logra sortearse al recorrer entre uno y otro.
While it was nice to learn the beginnings of Strasberg and the Method, it definitely dragged a bit for me personally. The bits I got out of it will be nice to review from this point forward especially, however I think it was a little less acting tips and a little more biography. Had some insightful quotes and thoughtful points however!
I read this in small increments to familiarize myself with the mysterious method I had so often heard mentioned. This book does a thorough explanation of the objective sought and the means of achieving it.
Strasberg is a watered down version of Stanislavsky. I’d honestly just recommend reading his stuff instead. Interesting book though, as Strasberg had a unique perspective on acting.