Stella Adler

Stella Adler was born in New York Click to look into! >> Read More... on February 10, 1901. She is the youngest daughter of Jacob P. Adler and Sarah Adler, who are the founders of an acting dynasty. Stella had five members in her family, she had three siblings Charles Adler, Jay Adler, Julia, and Luther Adler. She made her debut at the age of four. It was her family-owned theater in which she participated in the play "Broken Hearts". When she was 18, she made her London premiere as "Naomi" in "Elisa Ben Avia". She appeared in this for a year before going back to New York. Stella then devoured the next 10 years striding the boards in vaudeville and Yiddish language theaters all around North and South America and Europe.

In totality, she has appeared in 100 plays. Though Adler was widely praised in the Yiddish theater, she wanted to leave the theatrical ghetto and play a more expansive sort of role on the fair stage and in Hollywood. Her 83-year-long career witnessed her extreme commitment to enlarging the tier of artistry in the theater. She made her Broadway debut as a substitute in Carl Kapek's "The World We Live In". Later, she entered the acting school that was run by Richard Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya, the American Laboratory. During the 1930s, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg invited Adler to become a founding associate of the Group Theatre.

However, the Utopian political objectives that were prominent to the idea of the Group Theatre did not plead to Adler, nor did the combined focus of the company, but despite this, she joined after being promised to usher roles and because she sustained Clurman's idea of the theater as an art form. Here she played some of her more acclaimed parts, including "Sarah Glassman" in "Success Story", "Bessie Berger" in "Awake and Sing" and "Clara" in "Paradise Lost". In 1934, she traveled to Russia to study for five weeks in Moscow Art Theatre, and private sessions with the great man himself, Konstantin Stanislavski. Adler was among rare American actors, to learn personally with Stanislavsky.

Later feeling uneasy with the Group Theatre members, considerable of whom were also Communist Party members, she left the company in 1937 to dominate Hollywood. She spent six years as an associate producer at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, where she acted in movies as "Stella Ardler." However, she did not get the quality of roles or the credit she had in the theater, and she ultimately came back to the stage in the early 1940s. She acted and directed on Broadway and in London. She also started to teach at German émigré Erwin Piscator's acting workshop. Besides acting, she directed two plays on Broadway.

The first was "Manhattan Nocturne" and "Sunday Breakfast". Her last appearance as an actress on Broadway stage was in the rebirth of "He Who Gets Slapped" in 1946. Stella Adler renounced the faculty of the New School in 1949 to establish her acting school, the Stella Adler Theatre Studio, later renamed the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Stella Adler was a motivation to her students. Her saying was, "You act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors - because your souls are not used up by life". Stella Adler passed away at an age of 91 years on December 21, 1992, in Los Angeles.