Rebel Rebel by Chris Sullivan

Author:Chris Sullivan [Sullivan, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

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After the war Steiger found himself living in a $5 room on West 81st Street, New York, where the GI Bill of Rights entitled him to four years of schooling plus an income of $100 a month. The news that a certain drama group, as organised by the Office of Dependants and Beneficiaries, entertained and educated pretty young women attracted the young Steiger to the class and he was soon starring in the productions. He continued to study his craft at the New School for Social Research, run by German émigré Erwin Piscator, for some two years. Walter Matthau, another student at the time, dubbed the institution the Neurotic School for Sexual Research. As for Steiger, amazed and amused by his reception as an actor, he merely went from strength to strength.

It was around this time that Daniel Mann, one of Rod’s teachers, was asked to help a nascent theatrical institution founded by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis – the Actors Studio. It spawned the talents of Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, James Dean, and more recently Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Here each actor was taught, in the words of America’s first adherent to the form, director Harold Clurman, to ‘put the whole gamut of his physical and emotional being into the service of the dramatist’s meaning’.

Set up in October 1947, the Studio caused a sensation in December of that year with its first Broadway production, A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando and directed by Kazan.

Soon the Actors Studio, aided and abetted by its new rising star, became the place to study. Robert Lewis left and was eventually replaced by Austrian-born Lee Strasberg (Hymen Roth in The Godfather Part II), and ‘the method’ entered the dictionary both as a means of preparation for, and style of, acting.

Many of the actors and teachers at the Studio preferred the term ‘affective memory’, which, as Strasberg explained, ‘…makes it possible for us to join in the great tradition of acting. When Kean in Hamlet picked up the skull of Yorick, he cried, because he said he always thought of his uncle.’

Whatever the rhetoric Strasberg used, many of the Studio’s most able protagonists actually deride his style of tuition. Its most famous son, Marlon Brando, cites another tutor, Stella Adler, as changing the style of American acting in the 1950s and 1960s. Strasberg, the man whose name is synonymous with the form, is seen by many as being something of a bully, whose students, in the words of Elia Kazan, see ‘little joy in Lee’s work’.

Just as recent commentators have sadly overlooked Adler’s input, so has the artistry of many of the Actors Studio’s more notable talents. Steiger, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach were all destined to be character actors by virtue of their physical appearance, but to the true movie-lover they are the core of every film they appear in. It is they, and not the stars, that make the picture worth watching.

In terms of stardom, rather

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