but a human being, weak and fallible. Producers and writers began to speak of ‘American’ and ‘European’ acting. American acting stressed flair and feeling, European acting text and technique. ‘The big difference is that in England we have a great tradition of theatre,’ says Kenneth Branagh, who in 1993 directed, produced and acted with De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. ‘Most actors work through many different styles, from Shakespeare to Noël Coward to Harold Pinter, so you learn technique. The Americans are wonderful at being ordinary, at being real and gritty, and yet they have difficulty when technique is required. You ask an American actor to immediately turn on the tears and play a very emotional scene, and he will find it difficult.’
Working at the Moscow Art Theatre through the 1920s, Konstantin Stanislavski developed a system of mental exercises and games for actors to help them access the feelings that paralleled the emotions of the characters they played. Books like Building a Character elaborated his system. It never had a formal name, but came to be called in theatre circles just ‘the Method’.
Until 1949, while the Piscators remained in charge at the New School, two of his teachers were edgy, vivacious Stella Adler, daughter of a distinguished family in the Yiddish theatre, and an irascible and opinionated little man named Lee Strasberg. Adler and Strasberg shared a rivalry that went back to 1931, when three producer/directors, Strasberg, Howard Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, broke away from New York’s conservative Theater Guild to launch the Group Theater. The Group Theater presented plays in repertory, like European companies, playing them in rotation with the same company of actors who, as in Europe, worked to achieve a unified style of performance. Stella Adler, who married its co-founder Howard Clurman, became a star with the Group, of which Lee Strasberg was the acting ideologue.
In Strasberg’s version of the Method, the performer built up a role by ‘affective memory’, tapping deep emotions and ‘sense memories’, which he or she used to create the character. To play comedy, one accessed happy memories; for tragedy, childhood traumas. Not everyone in the Group cared for this self-analysis. An actor in the grip of a primal Oedipal conflict, they argued, could hardly be expected to give a sensitive portrayal of Hamlet.
Convinced that Strasberg had got it wrong, Adler went to Paris in 1934 to study under Stanislavski. Her description of Strasberg’s system surprised him. This was a version of the Method he’d long since abandoned. ‘Affective memory’, he explained, endangered both the mental health of the actor and the validity of the performance. Adler returned to New York in triumph with the news, but Strasberg shrugged. ‘I don’t teach the Stanislavski Method,’ he said. ‘I teach the Strasberg Method.’
In 1947, Cheryl Crawford, with director Elia Kazan and producer Robert Lewis, bought a converted Orthodox church on West 44th Street and opened the Actors Studio, where performers could practise ‘American acting’. Here, with an audience of professional colleagues, they could try new things, and, probably, fail. But in the process of failure they would learn and grow. It was exactly the milieu Strasberg needed, and he jumped at the chance to become the Actors Studio’s director.
From the start, Strasberg imposed a strict regime. Only performers could attend. It would be years before producers and directors were allowed in as guests. Doors were ritually locked before each session. All applicants had to audition, and most didn’t make it. In 1955, out of the two thousand who tried, only two were admitted: Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. Once in, however, membership was for life, and the eight hundred ‘anointed’ members were regarded as a theatrical elite.
Adler set up in opposition at the New School, where she taught her version of the Method. Tennessee Williams was a student. So were Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara and Marlon Brando, who became Adler’s lover, as he had been the lover of almost every other woman in the school.
While Piscator remained, he preached Expressionism: exaggerated gestures, symbolic poses, movements that externalised emotion – ‘Be big!’. Meanwhile, Stella in the basement was screaming at her students, ‘Don’t act! Stop acting!’ But once Piscator returned to East Germany, Adler inherited undisputed control, pointedly renaming the school ‘The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting’. Her pronouncements became more dogmatic. ‘You act with your soul,’ she said. ‘That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.’ At times, she approached folie de grandeur. Asked during a May Day parade if she could imagine living in a Communist state, she said she’d be happy to, providing it would crown her its queen.
Bobby drifted into classes with Luther James, an African-American director – hardly an obvious choice, given the racial tensions still persisting even in Manhattan. His mother didn’t try to dissuade him from his decision. ‘They were both supportive,’ he says of his parents. ‘They would never tell me, “No.”’
De Niro’s choice of a teacher clearly resonates with his subsequent preference for African-American wives and girlfriends. He’d been impressed by a 1960 Broadway stage version of Kyle Onstott’s trashy sex-and-slavery novel Mandingo. Franchot Tone played opposite the young Dennis Hopper, whom De Niro had seen in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. Bobby went backstage to meet him. As the two were introduced for the first time, a beautiful girl came up to Hopper and asked a question about acting. Acting as a way of meeting girls? De Niro had never thought of that.
Bobby returned to the New School in 1960, where Stella Adler was totally in charge. By then, her bête noire was the Actors Studio, where Strasberg was expounding his version of the Method to an increasingly mesmerised acting community. ‘She was always putting down the Actors Studio,’ says De Niro. ‘The Method thing – as opposed to the Conservatory of Acting.’
Unlike the Actors Studio, where people dressed as they liked, Adler’s male students were required to wear white shirts, black trousers and black shoes, while the girls wore skirts, blouses with high collars, shoes with heels, and hair pulled back from their faces. When she entered each day, usually late, dressed in black, made up as if for a stage appearance, and flanked by two assistants, the students stood and recited, ‘Good morning, Miss Adler. We are pleased to meet you and look forward to embarking with you on our journey to discover our art.’ This ritual over, Adler took her place in a leather chair at the centre of the stage, with her assistants on either side, and the class began.
‘She would be inspirational as a teacher for me,’ De Niro said. ‘There was a lot of pomp and splendour with her, but … she was a good teacher. Very good. I always give her credit for having a big effect on me. [She talked a lot about] Stanislavski. Building a Character. I think that that was really very important. I thought it was important for any actor. I couldn’t see how you wouldn’t be made aware of that. [Acting] is not about neurosis; playing on your neuroses. It’s about the character, and about doing that first: the tasks of the character. Not going on about it as if it was all about you and how you would do it. It was more about the character, being faithful to the text, the script.’
Adler cleansed the Method of psychoanalysis. ‘Affective memory’ was used sparingly, and only when the actor could find the character in no other way. Above all, the ‘given circumstances’ of a play, its plot and character, were the actor’s fundamental concerns. Real acting, she stressed, lay in making choices – not in imposing your psychology on the character but finding the character and choosing the way you explored and illuminated that character. ‘The talent is in the choices’ became not only her catchphrase but that of the generations of students she trained.
Between 1960 and 1963, the Conservatory of Acting totally occupied De Niro. He had no right to be there, since he hadn’t graduated from high school, but, subdued and diffident, he was conveniently invisible in the Conservatory’s large classes. Charles Carshon, who taught ‘Sight Reading’, a class in audition techniques which De Niro later singled out as particularly useful, says, ‘While I am very gratified that Robert De Niro remembered
