After 50 Years, It’s Still a Class Act

John Ritter remembers studying Tennessee Williams’ play “Summer and Smoke” in a class on script analysis in the mid-1980s taught by the late Stella Adler. The scene was set at twilight.

“She said, ‘Let’s talk about twilight--what it is, what it means,’ ” Ritter recalls. “ ‘Things happen there; you see things that may or may not be real.’ Twilight was about kind of hiding in the shadows. We spent, like, an hour on twilight!”

But from an actor’s perspective, Ritter says, it was one of the best hours he had ever spent. And, though Adler deemed Ritter “a pest” because of his constant questions when he first studied with her as a college student in 1970, she also told him his insatiable curiosity would ensure his success in the acting profession.

On the 50th anniversary of New York’s Stella Adler Conservatory--and, by extension, its younger Hollywood-based offshoot, the Stella Adler Theatre and Academy of Acting--Ritter and others speak of “Stella,” who died in 1992 at age 91, as if she were still alive. She was a queenly presence, noted for a tough-love style of teaching; her students included Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando.

Gordon Davidson, producer and artistic director of the Center Theatre Group, calls Adler one of the greatest actresses and teachers of our time, but notes that “she could reduce an actor to jelly, and an actress to blubber. And within two lines of the beginning of a theme--she didn’t wait. But it was because she always wanted you to dig deeper.”

And, in a sense, she is still alive. The New York school, founded in 1949, continues to flourish, as does her Hollywood theater and studios, established in 1986. Students may take individual classes, or pursue a two-year certificate program; many working actors drop in to brush up their skills.

“It changed my life,” says actress Susan Clark, who studied with Adler in the early ‘70s. “As a person, she was quite extraordinary; she was a role model for thousands, if not more.

“[She] constantly emphasized how hard actors have to work; you keep working out. That’s very important in Hollywood, where you can go a year between gigs. You lose your edge.”

Now helmed by Irene Gilbert, also a former actress and Adler’s closest friend, the Los Angeles school survived being ousted from its first location at Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle Avenue in 1993, when the landlord sold their space to the MTA. That facility had already suffered damage from a fire that broke out in a tattoo parlor down the street and raced through attic space shared by buildings on the entire block.

The academy now occupies the historic Embassy Club on Hollywood Boulevard at Highland Avenue, which served in the 1930s as a private supper club for the Hollywood elite, including Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.

Adler was the daughter of Jacob and Sarah Adler, Russian immigrants who were considered the premier tragedians of Yiddish theater, where Adler began to perform at age 4. A student of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Adler joined the Group Theater, co-founded by her brother Luther, Harold Clurman (to whom she was briefly married, one of three husbands), Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg.

Later in her career she became disenchanted with Strasberg’s emphasis on memory exercises and other techniques, focusing her own teaching on a practical program based on the imagination, rather than dredging up personal experiences to dramatize an emotion.

“She would say, ‘It doesn’t matter what you feel, it matters what they feel,’ ” says Holland Taylor. She discovered Adler in New York when she was already an established actress well into her 30s, after years of frustration with acting teachers who pushed students to revisit just how they felt when they drank that cup of scalding coffee after the puppy was run over.

“I was hearing someone who had a technique--repeatable, orderly, doable. It was rational,” says Taylor, who has taught her own course, called “About Stella,” at the theater. “If you are playing Queen Elizabeth I of England, and you are thinking of your grandmother in Hoboken, you’re insane.” Gilbert agrees. “You have all the emotions; it’s about how you can get there without hurting yourself,” she says. “I say to students: ‘You haven’t murdered anybody recently, have you?’ But you might play a murderer next month, so there’d better be another way to get there.”

Gilbert is the one who persuaded Adler to start a school in Los Angeles, even though Adler, with a New Yorker’s arrogance, at first deemed L.A. actors more interested in hitting the beach than honing their craft. “She was my teacher, my mentor, my friend; very close to being my mother,” Gilbert says.

When they learned they would be losing their first location, Adler demanded that Gilbert not just promise, but swear, that she would rebuild the school elsewhere. Adler did not live to see the new location, but “I think she would have been proud of it,” muses Gilbert, who is as reserved as Adler was flamboyant. “She looks down on me every once in a while and lets me know.”

Right now, its ornate entrance--located next door to the Hollywood Wax Museum and just beyond the sidewalk stars of Ray Charles and Vivien Leigh--is obscured by MTA construction. The building, which the academy leases from a private owner, was renovated at a cost of between $750,000 and $1 million. The building now contains a 99-seat theater, a 70-seat theater and six classrooms.

Leonora Schildkraut, 68, a theater sound designer and wife of the late Academy Award-winning actor and Embassy Club member Joseph Schildkraut, shouldered much of the nuts-and-bolts work of readying the new location on a volunteer basis--including securing endless building permits. The friendship between the Schildkraut and Adler families dates back to 1910.

Financing for the renovation came from community and MTA relocation funds, and private donations. And “I do believe Irene refinanced her house, I refinanced my house; it was kind of by hook or by crook,” says Schildkraut, who was assisted by theater board member Frank Muzzy. “There have been times when I’ve been down in the front on my hands and knees, scraping off old gum of 40 years.”

Schildkraut and the theater’s leadership have done their best to maintain the building’s historic character, including the painstaking restoration of the club’s speak-easy, where film legends would gather for an illegal nip during Prohibition. Theater Vice President Jack Rodgers sometimes plays a little mood music that wafts through the lobby, maybe some Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman.

Last December, the Stella Adler Theatre celebrated the 70th anniversary of the club with a holiday party requiring period dress. Rodgers--who as a student got the formidable work-study assignment of chauffeuring Adler in her later years--said the students had a great time learning the Charleston for the affair.

Rodgers notes that some believe the old building is haunted--but surely at least the ghost of Adler was present on a recent morning, as Gilbert dropped in on Charles Waxberg’s script analysis class to demand more energy from two students reading a scene from “A Lion in Winter.” “If you’re going to screw up a line, do it boldly!” she chided. Next door, in Stacy Ray’s class, bemused but enthusiastic students exercised the imagination by attempting to act out the difference between being “adventurous” and “outgoing” on a fictional hike through the Black Forest.

Gilbert maintains Adler’s belief that you can’t tell a diamond from a rock until you polish it. So she’ll give anyone the chance to enter a beginning class, including many actors already in their 30s, and at least one as old as 60.

“Can you tell right away if someone is talented? Stella said no,” Gilbert says. “Maybe Marlon [Brando] was the exception, but you can’t. It grows. I see it all the time. They come in and they don’t know anything, but then it starts to build.

“John Ritter, when he first came to Stella’s class, was just Tex Ritter’s kid. But after his first class, he decided this was something he wanted to work on--and he obviously developed into one hell of an actor.”