Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,377
By This is the grave of Lee and Paula Strasberg.
We will get to the, uh, difference in the graves of Lee and Paula here shortly, just hold on.
Born in 1901 in what is today Budanov, Ukraine but which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time, Israel Strassberg lived a quite common story in his early years. His father decided to go to the United States to escape anti-Semitism and earn money. At first, it was just him. He got a job in the garment industry. And then like so many Jewish garment workers, he saved and slowly brought his family over, starting with his oldest son so they could both work in the industry and double the savings and get everyone out. In 1909, young Lee and his mother came over and the family was reunited. They crowded into a Lower East Side tenement. Strasberg was a nerdy kid who loved reading. But he dropped out of school in depression after his brother died in the Spanish flu epidemic.
Strasberg started acting in the Yiddish theater at the recommendation of a settlement house worker. This was a pretty fertile scene and Strasberg excelled, though he had to support himself through working for a hairpiece maker. When Konstantin Stanislavski brought his actors to the U.S. in 1923, Strasberg saw them perform and got to know them some and was amazed by their commitment to the part. This was not the way in the U.S., where even serious actors were working a job, not reshaping their entire lives with each part to get that little extra performance. He started studying with a couple of Stanislavski’s people and hit the stage in his first professional production in 1925. By 1931, he was a relatively important figure in the New York theater scene. That year, he helped form the Group Theater. This was a group of actors, writers, and directors who wanted to bring serious social realism into the theater. Among the other figures were Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan. Strasberg was mostly a director by this time and he pushed his actors hard. The serious performances of his plays were largely praised by the critics. This was all tremendously influential on a lot of young people, including Arthur Miller.
Now, Strasberg was a very difficult guy. He got into arguments all the time with everyone around him. He had a gigantic ego. And so, he alienated lots of people over the years. His common practice of screaming in actors’ faces when they did not do what he wanted did not make him a lot of friends. He resigned from the Group Theater in 1937 over these differences. In 1947, the Actors Studio was born. Strasberg was not initially part of it but when he took over its artistic direction in 1951, he became the most influential acting coach in America, or at least he thought he was. It is worth noting though that for all Strasberg’s massive self-promotion, there were lots of other people involved in adapting Stanislavski’s ideas. Strasberg just promoted his own extreme version. In fact, Stanislavski rebuffed Strasberg, saying he missed the entire point of his ideas. Clifford Odets wrote in his diary that Strasberg’s problem was that an “emphasis on emotion grew out of the lack of affection in his upbringing.” On the other hand, Strasberg’s direction of Odets’ Waiting for Lefty made all their careers.
There’s no question that method acting was enormously influential. No one can deny this. All sorts of people worked under Strasberg at the Actors Studio–Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Sally Field, so many others. People such as Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson were tremendously influenced by this too, though Brando hated Strasberg and credited Stella Adler with teaching him how to act properly. The question people have asked ever since is whether it was worth it. The Method had no shortage of cult-like elements. The self-criticism sessions remind us of Maoist China. People were horrible to each other in the Actors Studio and that started at the top.
Actors of an older generation–Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda for instance, were pretty contemptuous of the whole thing. Their position was that acting was a job and when the day was over, you went home and lived your life. They were great actors too. And if you always knew you were watching Stewart or Fonda because they basically played the same character over and over, well, it was still good acting. Did it help to have Rod Steiger throw himself into every role to the point that he was a crazy person most of the time? Did it make Steiger an actor on the level of Fonda and Stewart? No, I don’t think so. I just watched All About Eve the other day and I was again reminded that Bette Davis’ performance in that film is equal to or greater than any performance in American film history. She didn’t need no stinkin’ Method.
Of course, the idea of the Method that real acting is throwing yourself fully into every role still remains powerful today. This is how you get ridiculous behavior from Jeremy Strong, who had to be Kendall Roy on and off screen. Brian Cox’s utter contempt for Strong’s behavior is a classic dismissal of the Method. This is also how you get the belief that Real Acting is gaining or losing 100 pounds for any given role, which is the Christian Bale way. I’m not sure any of this is a very good thing.
We can debate the Method and its descendants, but we can’t debate how important it was at the time. Marilyn Monroe is the classic example. She so wanted to be something other than a sex symbol. She was never able to transcend this (I wonder what would have happened with her career in the late 60s and 70s when fashion styles changed as the curvy blonde was replaced in American culture by the waif), but she sure as hell tried through her time at the Actors Studio. And while no one is ever going to call Monroe of the great actors of American history, the ascension from the ditzy blonde in the supporting role of All About Eve to the pretty spectacular work in The Misfits is a quite notable achievement of what the Method had to offer.
But Strasberg was a huge asshole. Brando (OK sure, a huge asshole too) really went after him in his autobiography:
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. He was an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio and tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshipped him, but I never knew why. I sometimes went to the Actors Studio on Saturday mornings because Elia Kazan was teaching, and there were usually a lot of good-looking girls, but Strasberg never taught me acting. Stella [Adler] did—and later Kazan.
Anyway, there’s a good New York Review of Books article from last year on all of this and that’s where I got these quotes. It’s worth reading.
This brings us to Paula Miller Strasberg. She was his second wife. His first had died in 1929 after they were only married for three years. Miller was born in New York to a Jewish family in 1909. She also got super in acting and first appeared on Broadway in 1927. She was in Strasberg’s circle and left her first husband for him. She was pretty well dominated by her overbearing husband but was also an important figure in the Actors Studio for years. She was blacklisted from the stage because she was a member of the Communist Party and so had to work in the Studio. Most importantly, she became Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach and best friend, really the person keeping her going toward the end. She died pretty young herself, in 1966, at the age of 57 and as you can see, has a simple stone.
Lee Strasberg continued though, with his most notable acting performance to everyone around today–Hyman Roth in The Godfather II. I don’t know how much “method” was really needed for that role. But Strasberg stole the movie. He did a few other movies late in life too, probably notably ….And Justice for All, also with Al Pacino.
Strasberg died in 1982, at the age of 80. It was a heart attack.
Lee and Paula Strasberg are buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Now, I find his over the top stone right next to her tiny little stone to be a classic move in domineering husband world, going into the grave. It’s possible that something larger will be there for his third wife, who is still alive. But I don’t know, it just seems classless to me.
If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the Group Theater, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Clifford Odets is in Glendale, California and Stella Adler is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.