ABSTRACT
And I sort of studied in a spotty way with flavor-of-the-month acting teachers. And my experience of them, although they were sensitive and interesting men, as it happened, I didn’t feel that they were teaching any kind of technique or dependable material for me to use in a practical way. It was really just a matter of taste and a matter of their encouraging honesty and spontaneity and stuff like that. So I did not study in any regular kind of way until I was in my mid-thirties and finally, somebody was speaking about Stella Adler as someone who did have just a tremendous wealth of usable, functional, information to give you about how to use yourself and how to think about acting and how to look at acting. I was not particularly interested in Strasberg’s training from various students of his who had spoken to me over the years about the way they worked which did not seem to me to be the way I wanted to work, using my personal inner life while acting. I understand very well using it in preparation and in homework, but I did not understand thinking about myself or my life or my history or any emotional moments in my life while acting. And so Stella appealed to me very much in concept and when I went to her, I was staggered by her and I instantly took every course she had. She was seventy-nine, then, and for the next two years I just completely submerged myself in Stella’s teaching. And so that was the big influence in my life.
