Sanford Meisner
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[edit] Early life
Sanford Meisner was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 31, 1905, the oldest son of a family of Jewish immigrants that came to America from Hungary. Two years later, Sanford’s younger brother Jacob, who would soon come to have a very lasting effect on his brother, was born. A year later, the family took a trip to the Catskills in an attempt to improve Sanford’s health, and Jacob was fed unpasteurized milk. The child soon contracted bovine tuberculosis, and died shortly thereafter. In an interview many years later, Meisner would identify this event as “the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped.” (Longwell 5) The young Meisner would soon become isolated and drawn-in, unable to cope with feelings of responsibility for his brother’s death, having been told by his parents that if it hadn’t been for him, they would not have gone to the country and Jacob would not have died.
He found release in playing the family piano, and although he attended the Damrosch Institute of Music to study piano for a year after graduating high school, the idea of acting professionally had always followed him, even since early youth. At 19, he learned that the Theatre Guild was hiring teenagers, and he jumped at the opportunity. After a brief interview, he was hired as an extra for They Knew What They Wanted. The experience deeply affected him, and he began to realize that acting was what he had been looking for in life.
[edit] The Group Theatre
Despite the intense misgivings of his parents, Meisner continued to pursue a career in acting, receiving a scholarship to study at the Theatre Guild of Acting, during which time he would meet two fellow theatre lovers who would change his life entirely, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, a man destined to become another of the century’s most influential acting theorists, and the father of Method Acting. The three became friends, and in 1931, Clurman and Strasberg, joined by Cheryl Crawford, another Theatre Guild member, would select 28 actors, one of whom was Meisner, and form the Group Theatre, which exerted a profound influence, not only on Meisner, but on the entire art of American acting.
After working with the Group Theatre through the 1940s, Meisner went on to become a teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. It was in teaching that he found a level of fulfillment alike to playing the piano as a child, and it was here that he began to develop his own acting technique, based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and his old friend Lee Strasberg, aptly called the Meisner Technique.
[edit] The Meisner Technique
As a teacher, Meisner was brilliant, his techniques both unorthodox and effective. Actor Dennis Longwell wrote of sitting in on one of Meisner’s class one day, in which he brought two students to the front for an example. They were given a single line of dialogue, told to turn away from him, and instructed not to do or say anything until something happened to make them say it, one of the fundamental principles of the Meisner Technique. The first student’s line came when Meisner approached him from behind and gave him a strong pinch on the back, inspiring him to jump away and yelp his line in pain. The other student’s line came when Meisner reached around and slipped his hand into her blouse. Her line came out as a giggle as she moved away from his touch. (Longwell 34) His techniques, while somewhat unusual, were extremely effective.
The goal of Meisner’s namesake, the Meisner technique, has often been described as getting actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” (Silverberg 9) The technique emphasizes actually carrying out an action truthfully on stage, and letting emotion and subtext build itself based on the truth of their actions and on the other characters around them, rather than simply playing an action or emotion. One of the most well known exercises of the Meisner Technique is Repetition, in which one person would spontaneously make a comment based on their partner’s behavior, and the phrase would be repeated back and forth in the same way until it had changed on its own, not merely for the sake of change. The objective was always to react truthfully, not merely change because it felt like change was called for.
Throughout his career, Meisner worked with and taught a great wealth of important names, including famous actors such as Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Bob Fosse, Jon Voight, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Kelly, Sydney Pollack and others such as well-known writers Arthur Miller and David Mamet. Though he rarely appeared on film, he appeared in the films [[Tender is the Night]], [[The Story on Page One]] and [[Mikey and Nicky]]. His last acting role was in an episode of the television medical drama E.R., an episode which Noah Wyle referred to as the highlight of his career. Meisner’s work is almost universally admired, and he has been regarded as one of the most important acting theorists of the 21st century.
Sanford Meisner moved to California in his eighth decade of life and opened to the Sanford Meisner Center in 1995. As passionate as ever, Meisner was determined to turn the sixty seat theater into a lively school in which Meisner graduates would interact with other artists. His school still exists today under the direction of his long time partner Jimmy Carville.
Sanford Meisner died on February 2nd, 1997 at the age of 91. Though his life may have ended, his work lives on, and to this day his theories still inspire some of the greatest actors of our time.
[edit] Famous Meisner Quotes
"The foundation of acting is the reality of doing."
"You know it's all right to be wrong, but it's not all right not to try."
"There's no such thing as nothing."
"Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning."
"May I say as the world's oldest living teacher, 'Fuck Polite!'"
[edit] External links
- Sanford Meisner at the Internet Movie Database
- www.themeisnercenter.com
- Sanford Meisner Master Class DVD
- Redbud Productions
[edit] Sources
Silverberg, Larry. The Sanford Meisner Approach: An Actor’s Workbook. New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, Inc., 1994
Longwell, Dennis and Sanford Meisner. Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Random House, 1987
“Sanford Meisner.” The Internet Movie Database. 22 November 2006. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0577073
Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre’s Best Kept Secret. Dir. Nick Doob. Perf. Sanford Meisner, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Sydney Pollack. 1985. VHS, 1985.
