Short history of The Method
How did "The Method" come about? Well, it all really started with Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863 - 1938) - the Russian theatre director, actor and teacher who sought a solution to the main problem of acting, as he saw it: the problem of inspiration, or experiencing. He believed that great acting is achieved when the actor really experiences something real on the stage, and not just indicate it with conventional external gestures, as was the custom up until then. And great actors were sometimes great, when they 'had a good day', or when 'inspiration came upon them', but often times they were not, and reverted to external mechanical acting, i.e. pretending! But is there a way for the actor to be inspired at will? To make themselves really experience what the character experiences, when they need to, as dictated by the play and the director? Stanislavsky devoted his entire, relatively short, life to finding the answer to this question, through forming his own theatre - the Moscow Art Theatre, directing and acting in the plays which the theatre produced (such as the plays of Anton Chekhov), and working with actors in the various "studios" of the theatre. The various techniques which he experimented with and discovered were labeled as "The Stanislavsky System", and word of it soon started spreading outside of Russia.
In 1923 The Moscow Art Theatre came on a tour to the US, and a young wig-factory worker and amateur theatre lover by the name of Lee Strasberg happened to see their performances in New York. He was completely taken aback by the level of performances he saw, and by how real every member of the company seemed to be. They all, even the actors in the smallest roles, seemed to be experiencing something real on the stage, which was a sharp contrast to the kind of indicatory, conventional acting that he used to see on Broadway. When Strasberg heard that two members of the Moscow Art Theatre company - Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya - have managed to stay in the US after the tour was over, he seized the opportunity and enrolled in the theatre school they have just opened in New York: The American Laboratory Theatre.
This was the beginning of Lee Strasberg's own life journey, devoted to further developing and perfecting the techniques discovered by Stansilavsky, and adjusting them to the American theatre and film industries. He has done so throughout the many stages of his own acting, directing, and teaching career, beginning with the groundbreaking theatre group he has formed in 1931 with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford: The Group Theatre (which had later prominent acting teachers Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Bobby Lewis among it's ranks, in addition to renown playwright Clifford Odets and influential director Elia Kazan). His work with actors continued in his private classes held at Carnegie Hall and other places in New York, which were replaced in 1969 by the official Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. But the bulk of his work with actors was done at the famed Actors Studio in New York - not a school, but a workshop for professional actors - of which he became the artistic director in 1951, a position he held until his death in 1982.
It was The Actors Studio under Lee's leadership that produced the first "Method Actors" such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe, who started using the techniques taught by Strasberg to create real and moving performances on the stage and screen. Their game-changing performances in the films of Elia Kazan and others (coupled with their good looks, of course...), have made them into instant movie stars for the 'youth generation' of the 1950's, and "The Method" became a household name in America and the rest of the world. From that moment on, every aspiring actor flocked to New York to audition for membership at the Studio, and study with Lee Strasberg. Over the next decades, scores of major film stars who have worked with Lee at the Studio and his private classes - Kim Stanley, Shelley Winters, Eva Marie Saint, Eli Wallach, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, Shirley Knight, Sally Field, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Mickey Rourke and many others - have cemented "The Method"'s status as the most highly acclaimed and commonly used acting technique in America, and the very foundation of modern American Acting.
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