The public had been primed for the Method’s startling brand of naturalism with the success of John Garfield, a Group member who had introduced a rebellious, tortured charisma to Hollywood. But Brando, as Adler saw, was its ideal vessel. He was a great mimic, but he hadn’t been trained to talk like an actor, with consonants of cut glass; he stammered and mumbled like a real person. It didn’t hurt that he was gorgeous, with a rare, paradoxical beauty, sculpted and soft. And he had that indefinable, electric quality that lit up the stage: “absolute truth” in motion. In “Truckline Cafe,” Brando played a war vet who kills his girlfriend and then goes wild with grief. When he howled over her corpse, he didn’t seem to be performing. He just was. The show had to pause after his final exit as the audience stamped and cheered.
In 1947, Kazan directed “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway. Tennessee Williams had written Stanley Kowalski as a middle-aged man, but Kazan wanted Brando for the part. He sent the actor to visit Williams at home, and Williams cast him on sight.
That choice changed the nature of the play. Stanley, a lout and a drunk, represents reality at its ugliest; the fantasist Blanche DuBois, played by the classically trained British actress Jessica Tandy, was supposed to be the heroine. But audiences sided with Brando, and so did Kazan, even when Brando, to keep things real, began changing up his performance every night, throwing off Tandy’s. She complained that Brando was “an impossible, psychopathic bastard”—an inadvertent compliment, suggesting that he had fully merged with his character, the ultimate Method goal.
Kazan’s film version of “Streetcar,” released in 1951, made Brando a star. Kazan was on fire; he had won an Oscar three years earlier for “Gentleman’s Agreement,” and was in the midst of one of Hollywood’s great streaks. Then, in 1952, the House Un-American Activities Committee called on him to testify. Unsurprisingly, the company that had produced “Waiting for Lefty” had harbored a Communist cell; Kazan had been a member for a year and a half. Kazan first declined to coöperate, but then he appeared in front of the committee and named all eight Party members of the Group.
In his memoir, Kazan writes at length about his notorious decision to name names, his unwillingness to sacrifice himself for a cause he no longer supported, the pressures on him and his career. Then a memory comes to him. In 1936, the Party had ordered the Group’s cell to seize control of the company. When Kazan refused, he was publicly shamed and kicked out:
I couldn’t clean out of my mind the voice of V.J. Jerome and its tone of absolute authority as he passed on the Party’s instructions for our Group Theatre cell and his expectation of unquestioning docility from me and the others. I heard again in my memory the voice, arrogant and absolute, of the Man from Detroit as he humiliated me before my “comrades” in Lee Strasberg’s apartment over Sutter’s Bakery. I recalled the smell of the sweet chocolate topping and the cinnamon from below and how silent my fellow members had been, unresponsive until they’d voted against me.
The “arrogant and absolute” voice of his enemy, the silence of his friends, the smell of chocolate and cinnamon: this is exactly the kind of precise, scalding memory that Strasberg taught actors to draw on to access emotion onstage. Kazan had found his motivation. His audience only got it once, but they only needed it once.
In 1947, Kazan co-founded the Actors Studio. “Studio,” with its aura of experimentation, is a Stanislavski word; the idea was to create a school thatwould train actors to seem as untrained as Brando did. Four years later, Kazan named Strasberg its creative director, plucking him out of the has-been heap and putting him in charge of shaping a new generation.Soon the hottest up-and-coming actors were identified with the Method: James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Anne Bancroft, Lee Remick, Julie Harris, Eva Marie Saint. So were a lot of actors who weren’t so hot. Butler tells a joke that went around Broadway in the fifties, about a confrontation between a Method actor and George Abbott, who directed such non-realist fare as the “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees.” Abbott tells the actor to cross the stage. The actorasks, “But what’s my motivation?” Abbott says, “Your job.”
When the insurgents become the establishment, those who helped put them there are bound to revolt. “It is itself an orthodoxy,” Kazan complained of Strasberg’s Method in 1962. Bobby Lewis, another Actors Studio co-founder, who had defected to Yale, rented a theatre down the street and started giving a lecture called “Method—or Madness?” Even Brando denied the faith. “She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations,” he wrote of Adler, “as some other well-known so-called ‘methods’ of acting have done.”
The exploitation charge was often lobbed against Strasberg, and it’s not hard to see why. If students didn’t arrive at the Actors Studio with sufficient emotional scars to work with, they likely had them by the time they left. In the late seventies, Mr. Rogers, of all people, interviewed Strasberg for a short-lived TV show for adults. In interview mode, Strasberg is calm, thoughtful, stately. Then the camera cuts to the Actors Studio, where Strasberg is working himself into a frenzy. “If you don’t know what you have to create, you will never in your life create it!” he screams at his students. Strasberg is old and short (five-five). His hair is white; his eyes dilate behind his rimless glasses. You think he might have a heart attack. But it is a student who breaks, bursting into tears: pulp.
Some claimed that the Method amounted to unlicensed psychoanalysis, but Strasberg countered with an ingenious defense. “The psychologist’s purpose in helping his patient to relax is to eliminate mental and emotional difficulties and disturbances,” he maintained, while his was “to help each individual to use, control, shape, and apply whatever he possesses to the task of acting.” Strasberg wasn’t trying to cure his actors of what ailed them. He needed them to stay unwell, for the work.
Nevertheless, some form of transference did take place. In the fifties, Strasberg and his wife, Paula, got close to Marilyn Monroe. It’s hard to think of an actress equipped with more emotional difficulties and disturbances. Monroe was a Method gold mine; the Strasbergs could help her turn her pain into art. She moved in with them, sharing a room with their teen-age daughter. Paula, whom the press called a “black-shrouded Svengali” (she favored dark kerchiefs), became Monroe’s private on-set coach, talking her through each take of “Bus Stop” (1956) and “Some Like It Hot” (1959)—and Monroe, addicted to booze and drugs, needed a serious number of takes. But she wanted a part that would allow her to make the most of her training, so her then husband, Arthur Miller, wrote her one, in “The Misfits” (1961). At the start of the film, Monroe’s character, an adrift divorcée, gets to talking about her parents. “They both weren’t there,” she says. Her face darkens, then crumples; she seems to disappear into her past. Monroe’s whole life is in that line, and so is all of the Method. She died the following year, leaving the Strasbergs her personal effects.
It is quite possible to read all three hundred and sixty-three pages of Butler’s book and still be unable to define exactly what the Method is. That’s not a dig. Just when you think you have the thing pinned down, it changes. A technique becomes an attitude; the attitude becomes an aura—or an affect. Many people thought that James Dean, who trained with Strasberg at the Actors Studio, was the second coming of Brando. Brando thought that Dean, with his masculine moodiness and his Kowalski bluejeans, was a lame copycat. It may be ironic that a technique designed to inculcate originality bred so many imitators, but it also makes sense. Method actors, at least the Strasberg kind, are supposed to draw on their own lives for their work, but the movies aren’t separate from life. What difference does it make if your strongest emotions come from something that happened to you or from something that you saw? Use it.
Butler thinks that peak Method came in the late sixties and early seventies, when New Hollywood took the Method’s gritty, granular approach to the mainstream. Performances like those of Actors Studio alums Dustin Hoffman, in “The Graduate,” and Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, seemed groundbreaking—they still do—but by the time you get to them in Butler’s book some of the tricks that made them fresh feel pretty stale. Hoffman, in his screen test for “The Graduate,” accessed Benjamin Braddock’s interiority by grabbing Katharine Ross’s ass; to get into character on “Kramer vs. Kramer,” he taunted Meryl Streep about the death of her partner, John Cazale, and slapped her across the face off camera. Streep, who trained at Yale but never belonged to any particular school of acting, didn’t respond to that kind of thing any better than Jessica Tandy had, and, with her twenty-one Oscar nominations, she did get something like the last laugh.
The morphing of the Method into a catchall term for hard-core immersion seems to have begun with Robert De Niro, an Adler student. De Niro drove a taxi to prepare for “Taxi Driver,” and trained with the real Jake LaMotta for “Raging Bull.” He didn’t want to find himself in his parts—he wanted to lose himself completely. You can see why this approach had such appeal for the actors who followed. It’s macho, sexy. Plus, not everyone has sufficient inner depth to plumb for Strasberg’s approach or the kind of imagination that Adler prized. The old Method was about paring back, stripping down. In the new Method, more is more.
Acting changes, and so do actors; so does realism itself. The world that Stanislavski set out to capture with Chekhov looked nothing like that of the strikers in “Waiting for Lefty.” The Method didn’t disappear. It just lost its monopoly on the real, and that seems a good thing.
Strasberg died, at the age of eighty, in 1982. (“Good riddance,” Adler said.) He had enjoyed a late-in-life triumph, when Pacino got him cast as Hyman Roth, in “The Godfather: Part II.” It is nice, after more than forty decades of teaching something, to show that you can do it, too.
Adler died ten years later, at ninety-one. Then she came back to life, in the form of a posthumously published collection of lectures called “The Art of Acting.” Like Strasberg, Adler was a shouter. Her voice bounces right off the page, and what she has to say doesn’t apply only to professionals. Stanislavski pointed out that we’re all actors, performing our lives, and it’s easy to feel stuck in our roles. The Method is often portrayed as an exercise in interiority. But Adler tells her students that they need to go beyond themselves. They shouldn’t expect the world to shrink down to their size. They should expand to meet it:
There is one rule to be learned. Life is not you. Life is outside you. If it is outside, you must go toward it. You must go toward a person, and if he or she backs off it’s their fault. The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go toward it.♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the title of “An Actor Prepares.”
