Stella Adler

These are collected classroom lectures by the famous acting teacher:

One night, when Olivier was playing Othello, he gave what must have been an electrifying performance. Even he was startled by it. And the audience would not stop applauding. Maggie Smith, who was playing Desdemona, was also stunned. When the curtain was rung down for the last time, instead of going to her own dressing room she went to his. She found him sitting there alone in the dark. “Larry,” she asked him. “How did you do it?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Interestingly, shortly after giving this momentous performance Olivier went into a horrible artistic funk. I suppose it’s what they would call a midlife crisis, but it was unusually severe. He was convinced he knew nothing about acting. He was afraid every time he went out on stage that a moment would come in the performance when he would have to step down to the footlights, beg the audience’s forgiveness and ask that the curtain be brought down because he would not be able to remember his lines or not be able to perform. That never happened, but for years the possibility that it might happen haunted him. Many years afterward he described this crisis in an interview, and I wondered if it had to do with that night when he did some of the best acting he ever did in his life and didn’t understand how.

An origin story:

Now I didn’t have a so-called normal childhood, because I lived with the greatest actor I’ve ever seen, who happened to be my father. Jacob P. Adler was recognized in America as one of the greatest actors of all time. When Stanislavski came to America he sought out my father because my father had played a role in Yiddish that Stanislavski was going to play in Russian and he wanted to know how my father had done certain things. My father didn’t give me a moment’s peace. If we were walking in the street, he’d point to someone and say, “Look at her. Look at the way she walks. Look at him. Watch the way he uses his hands. Imitate her voice.” I was always being told to do something. I wasn’t told just to walk. My father’s eyes never stopped. All of his kids had to imitate everything. He didn’t care whether we slept or not. At night we would be taken out of bed. Company would be there. “Get up and imitate your teacher,” he would order us. We were acting all the time. “Observe! Observe! Observe!” he’d tell us. I was sitting in a box in the theatre with him once, and he saw a girl in the next box who had a nervous habit. He studied her and he started imitating her. He never stopped for a minute. That’s the way you become an actor. You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.