What Is the Stella Adler Acting Technique?

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“In your choices lies your talent,” said actor and theatre practitioner Stella Adler. A disciple and one-time pupil of influential Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavsky, she used his method to inform her own technique for helping actors deliver authentic, deliberate performances. 

Her legacy lives on at schools like the Stella Adler Academy of Acting & Theatre in Hollywood and the Stella Adler Center for the Arts in New York City. But you don’t need to study stateside to get to grips with the basics of her practice. Here’s the Stella Adler acting technique explained.

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Who was Stella Adler?

Born in 1901 to parents prominent in New York’s Yiddish theatre scene, Stella Adler was an American actor and acting teacher who first appeared on stage at just 4 years old. Her Broadway premiere came in 1922, the same year Stanislavsky’s system arrived in the U.S. and revolutionised approaches to the craft. 

Adler became a keen follower of Stanislavsky – studying his psychologically driven approach under Moscow Art Theatre graduates Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavsky at their American Laboratory Theatre in New York – before joining the Group Theatre, co-founded by another Stalislavsky apostle, Lee Strasberg. 

In the early 1930s, Adler travelled to Paris and studied under Stanislavsky himself. She’d been concerned by how reliant American interpretations of his technique were on drawing from personal memory, which she believed was limiting and potentially damaging. But here, she learned Stanislavsky had in fact revised his theories and now believed the actor should use their imagination, rather than memory, to create. This focus on imagination became a core facet of Adler’s own technique, which she continued to develop upon her return to the States. She also distanced herself from Strasberg and his Method acting technique, which she believed was based on an outdated interpretation of Stanislavsky’s system.

While both Strasberg and Sanford Meisner, another prominent theatre practitioner, founded acting techniques rooted in the teachings of Stanislavsky, only Adler was taught by him directly, returning to the U.S. with firsthand knowledge of his theories – and permission to develop her own technique based on them.

What is the Stella Adler acting technique?

Acting technique

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Adler’s technique is founded on the principle that actors must fully understand their characters in order to give compelling performances. Unlike her contemporary Meisner, who believed the best way to achieve this was by tapping into emotional memories associated with personal experiences, Adler’s technique encourages actors to focus on their characters’ world, filling in its finer details to realistically play the part. 

Exercises to achieve this include: 

1. Script analysis: Adler’s technique encourages actors to analyse the script for clues about their character and the world of the story, rather than relying solely on the director’s interpretation. What does the text tell you about their personality? Or their life circumstances? 

2. Imagination: Post script study, Adler focused on imagining the world of characters, mentally fleshing out the circumstances of the narrative with details including smells, textures, sounds, and other sensory specifics.  

3. Emotion: “Act with your soul,” Adler instructed her actors. Like Stanislavsky, Adler believed that to deliver an authentic performance, actors must commit to understanding their characters’ emotional psyche. 

4. Action: Adler saw an action as something a character does to another character to elicit a desired response. So long as an actor’s actions honestly reflect their character observations, completing an action should help convey the story’s circumstances.

How the Stella Adler technique compares with similar methods

Adler’s practice is one of several internalised acting techniques, along with Stanislavsky’s system, Strasberg’s Method, and the Meisner technique. Adler, Strasberg, and Meisner each developed an acting technique inspired by Stanislavsky’s system. Like his prototype, their styles focused on delivering a performance with emotional authenticity, but their approaches vary in how best to achieve this. 

While Strasberg’s Method requires the use of personal memories to inform a performance, Adler’s technique encourages an investment in imaginary circumstances. Meisner, too, favoured an actor’s imagination over their lived experience, but Adler arguably went further than Meisner in instructing actors to venture outside the rehearsal room and observe the world around them, finding inspiration for their characters in what they saw. An academic herself, Adler also encouraged her students to read up on the world they were looking to portray – its time period, cultural norms, and historical legacy – to understand where its writer was coming from, and to create authentic characters.

The pros and cons of the Stella Adler Technique

Adler’s technique has a number of benefits, from championing imagination and creativity, to equipping its students to “become” characters different from themselves. It is less emotionally taxing than practices like Strasberg’s Method, which is sometimes criticised for resurfacing past traumas. Marlon Brando, who was famously put through his paces by Adler, spoke highly of his former teacher. 

“Stella, you see, taught me how a play was built, how ideas were inserted as if they were bricks and windows and cornices and buttresses; how characters were inserted to allow light or shadow or a better view; how a playwright transmitted thoughts and ideas, and how actors were then empowered, required, to pick up those thoughts and ideas and transmit them to both their fellow players and to an audience,” he said. “She taught me everything.” 

Like any acting technique, Adler’s style won’t be for everyone. An intellectual, studious approach, it requires a commitment that extends beyond the rehearsal room, to the world outside. It also requires a deep interrogation of the script and independent research of its context that some may find mentally draining.

Which famous actors trained with Stella Adler?

Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Mark Ruffalo

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From Robert De Niro to Diana Ross, several stage and screen stars are former students of Adler. She began teaching in the early 1940s and founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1949; she continued with her school into the 1980s, teaching at Yale University and New York University along the way. As fierce as she was revered, Adler was notoriously tough on her students, delivering lessons that sounded like passionate rants. But she was clearly doing something right; what do the below famous faces have in common? They all studied under Adler.  

  • Benicio Del Toro
  • Christopher Guest
  • Salma Hayek
  • Kate Mulgrew
  • Mark Ruffalo

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