Sanford Meisner, actor and acting teacher, was born 116 years ago today.
Meiser developed a form of Method acting (based on the “system” of Constantin Stanislavski) that is now known as the Meisner technique.
Born in Brooklyn, Meisner was the oldest of four children. When the Great Depression hit, Meisner's father pulled him out of music school to help in the family business in New York City's Garment District. Meisner later recalled that the only way he could endure days spent lugging bolts of fabric was to entertain himself by replaying, in his mind, all the classical piano pieces he had studied in music school.
Meisner believed this experience helped him develop an acute sense of sound, akin to perfect pitch. Later, as an acting teacher, he often evaluated his students' scene work with his eyes closed (and his head dramatically buried in his hands). This trick was only partly for effect. The habit, he explained, actually helped him to listen more closely to his students' work and to pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.
After graduation from high school, Meisner pursued acting professionally, which had interested him since his youth. He had acted at the Lower East Side's Chrystie Street Settlement House under the direction of Lee Strasberg, who was to play an important role in his development.
At 19, Meisner heard that the Theatre Guild was hiring teenagers. After a brief interview, he was hired as an extra for They Knew What They Wanted. The experience deeply affected him and he realized that acting was what he had been looking for in life.
He and Strasberg both appeared in the original Theatre Guild production of the Rodgers and Hart review, The Garrick Gaieties, from which the song "Manhattan" came.mDespite his parents' misgivings, Meisner continued to pursue a career in acting, receiving a scholarship to study at the Theatre Guild of Acting. Here he encountered once again Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.
Strasberg was to become another of the century’s most influential acting theorists and the father of Method acting, an acting technique derived, like Meisner's own, from the “system” of Konstantin Stanislavski. The three became friends.
In 1931, Clurman, Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford (another Theatre Guild member) selected 28 actors (one of whom was Meisner) to form the Group Theatre. This company exerted an influence on the entire art of acting in the United States.
Meisner summered with the Group Theater at their rehearsal headquarters at Pine Brook Country Club in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut. Along with a number of other actors in the company, Meisner eventually resisted Strasberg's preoccupation with Affective memory exercises.
In 1934, fellow company member Stella Adler returned from private study with Stanislavski in Paris and announced that Stanislavski had come to believe that, as part of a rehearsal process, delving into one's past memories as a source of emotion was only a last resort.
The actor, she learned, should seek rather to develop the character's thoughts and feelings through physical action, a concentrated use of the imagination and a belief in the "given circumstances" of the text. As a result, Meisner began to focus on a new approach to acting.
When the Group Theatre disbanded in 1940, Meisner continued as head of the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, at which he had taught since 1935. In teaching, he found a level of fulfillment similar to that which he had found in playing the piano as a child.
At the Playhouse, he developed his own form of Method acting that was based on Stanislavski's system and Meisner's training with Lee Strasberg and on Stella Adler's revelations about the uses of the imagination.
Today, that approach is called the Meisner technique. It was during these early years at The Neighborhood Playhouse that Meisner was briefly married to the young actress, Peggy Meredith, who appeared in several Broadway productions.
The Actors Studio was founded in 1947 by two ex-Group Theatre actors, the then successful directors Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. Meisner was one of the first to teach at the studio. Ironically, at first Strasberg was not asked, but by 1951 he had become its artistic director.
Many students of the Actors Studio became well known in the film industry. Strasberg's later insistence that he had trained them distressed Meisner enormously, creating an animosity with his ex-mentor that continued until Strasberg's death.
Throughout his career, Meisner worked with, and taught, students who became well known, such as Sandra Bullock, Dylan McDermott, Eileen Fulton, James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Jack Lord, Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Peter Falk, Jon Voight, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Kelly, James Doohan, Jason Boss, Manu Tupou, Tony Randall and Sydney Pollack.
Pollack together with Charles E. Conrad served as Meisner's senior assistants. Meisner’s technique is helpful not just for actors, but also for directors, writers and teachers. A number of directors also studied with Meisner, among them Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, and writers such as Arthur Miller and David Mamet.
Though he rarely appeared on film, Meisner performed in Tender Is the Night, The Story on Page One and Mikey and Nicky. His last acting role was in the Season One episode of the television medical drama ER, "Sleepless In Chicago." Actor Noah Wyle worked with him and referred to the experience as the highlight of his career.
He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1970 and underwent a laryngectomy. Meisner died in his sleep at his Sherman Oaks, California home in February, 1997.
Here is a taste of Meiser’s acting classes