Stella Adler: Revered & Feared

The legendary mentor who taught Brando and De Niro, among others, came to Toronto one drizzly April evening in 1983 to present a lecture. Famous for her acerbic tongue and her insistence on emotional honesty in acting, she did not disappoint with her leonine delivery. She also toned it down to kitten-level when the moment called for it.

Looking stunning in black evening gown and honey-coloured curls, she walked on stage to a standing ovation. You wouldn't have guessed that she was 82 and she certainly wouldn't have told you, as she'd been cagey about her birthdate for years, but she was willing to tell us plenty else that day, with this caveat:

"I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know. I'm just here to remind you, to reawaken your imagination."



Before really getting into her subject matter she implored us to give her our undivided attention. "Listening is not sitting back. It's not just with your ears. Listening is with everything you have. Listening is with your blood and your bones."



As one of the members of the Group Theatre in the 30s, Adler was the only one to have actually studied with Stanislavski, the Russian actor and teacher whose acting systems the Group had adopted.

"One of the things Stanislavski taught me was the importance of location: Where are you? Where?" She told us an anecdote about preparing to play Nora in "A Doll's House". "Because I wasn't joining in the conversation at a dinner party, the host asked me what was on my mind. I answered: 'Norwegian topography.'"

Other lessons passed down from the master: "All plays take part in the present. It is up to the actor to create the past. You don't think so?" Adler challenged, her kolh-lined eyes scanning the audience. "Well, let me do the thinking. I gave up a lot of fun to think. I could've been a real fun girl!" 



Everything save the audience's attention moved down an octave as Adler spoke in a soft, low voice to unravel the dark mystery that was August Strindberg, a man who hated women as much as he loved them, a man who wanted to marry a virgin, and who, in pursuit of this goal, wed and divorced three actresses in succession. A fact that produced a guffaw from Adler.

"Strindberg," she told us, "created what he called the 'third sex': the emancipated woman." A sex he could never quite abide, for he felt essentially that woman's place was beside man, caring for him and his offspring. "How do you like him so far?" she asked us, and a woman in the first row yelled: "If he weren't already dead I'd kill him!"



But for all his dark complexity and obvious misogyny, Adler told us she still respected Strindberg and his work for having posed the questions that concern us all and for having embraced the daily struggle that confronts us all.

She then performed a short piece from "Miss Julie". "...I climb and climb, but the trunk is so thick and smooth and it's so far to the first branch. But I know if I can once reach that first branch, I'll go to the top just as if I'm on a ladder. I haven't reached it yet, but I shall get there, even if only in my dreams."



Having covered Strindberg and touched on Ibsen, Adler's assistant, a young man whom she addressed as Eddie, tugged at her sleeve to get her to wrap it up as she had gone into overtime. As she quietly had words with him the audience caught a name (she talked in a stage whisper, of course) and broke into applause. The name was Tennessee Williams.



Adler read from an account written by Tennessee about his sudden move from poverty to riches following the success of "The Glass Menagerie" on Broadway. Williams recounts in the piece the spiritual vacuity he'd found whilst living like a king in an ivory tower. Swamped with insincere accolades and false attentions he finally fled his Manhattan hotel suite and escaped to anonymity and the earthly reality of Mexico.


"Success," he wrote of the time, "is like a wolf waiting to eat you, each and every fang one of the small vanities..." At this metaphor Adler nodded, her golden curls quivering under the bright stage lights. Her eyes sparkled with tears as she exclaimed that she could feel Tennessee writing this with all his heart.

She read on: "...the public Somebody you are when you have a name is a fiction created with mirrors...the only somebody worth being is the private solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath."


Concluding with a piece from "Orpheus Descending", Adler was youthful in her delivery, ancient in her comprehension. Silence reigned as the last line was delivered.

Then, with eyes raised towards the clear blue of an imagined sky, she summarized: "A bird that can't be seen..." remembering the one who'd written of that bird, the one who had longed to be "a kind of bird with transparent wings the colour of the sky, a bird you can't tell from the sky..."

Stella Adler first trod the boards at age 4 alongside her father, the celebrated Yiddish Theatre actor Jacob Adler. She ended her acting career in 1961 after 55 years, then devoted herself to teaching. She died in 1992 at age 91.