The history of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, and its expansion into the Art of Acting Studio – Los Angeles and the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, includes not only Stella Adler but also bears inclusion of Konstantin Stanislavski, Jacob Adler, Harold Clurman and the Group Theatre.
Stella Adler
From 1905 until her death eighty-seven years later, Stella Adler dedicated her life to preserving and expanding the highest level of art in the theater. The youngest daughter of Sara and Jacob Adler, Stella began her career on her father’s stage at the age of four in a production of Broken Hearts. She spent her young adult life performing throughout the United States, Europe and South America, appearing in more than 100 plays in vaudeville and the Yiddish theater. Following her Broadway debut, she joined the American Laboratory headed by Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, both former members of the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1931, when Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford created The Group Theatre, Stella was invited to join as a founding member. With the Group, her roles included Sarah Glassman in Success Story, Adah Menken in Gold Eagle Guy, Bessie Berger in Awake and Sing! and Clara in Paradise Lost.
Taking a brief leave of absence in 1934 to travel to Russia, she stopped in Paris, where she met and studied for five weeks with Konstantin Stanislavski. When she returned to The Group Theatre with a new understanding of his work, she began to give acting classes for other members, including Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis, all of whom went on to become notable theatrical directors and acting teachers.
For six years, Stella worked in Hollywood as an associate producer at MGM and played a number of roles (under the name Stella Ardler) in movies such as Love on Toast (1937) and The Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). She returned to New York and London to direct and act in many plays, among them the London premiere of Manhattan Nocturne, the Off-Broadway revival of the Paul Green/Kurt Weil anti-war play Johnny Johnson, as well as Sons and Soldiers, Pretty Little Parlor, and He Who Gets Slapped. Her last stage appearance was in the critically controversial production of Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet, and I’m Feeling So Sad (1959).
In the early 1940s, Stella began to teach at the Erwin Piscator Workshop at the New School for Social Research. She left the faculty in 1949 to establish her own studio called the Stella Adler Theatre Studio (later renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting and finally the Stella Adler Studio of Acting). She went on to teach some of the most prolific stage and film actors of the 20th Century. Stella’s papers are archived at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.