Stanislavski System Quotes

I was someone who was out of control and not to be worked with. It was partly because method acting was a new thing in Hollywood then and Marlon Brando had gotten through and Montgomery Clift had gotten through and James Dean but beyond that there wasn't really anybody.

I have no idea what 'method actor' means.

For the actor, The Lee Strasberg Notes are an indispensable companion.

The worst acting is about imitation.

There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.

My problem with the traditional acting method was that I never understood what you were supposed to be thinking about when you're onstage.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

Some people have heard of The Method, which originally goes back to Stanislavski... he gave you six major pointers whereby you became that character and tried to fool your mind psychologically. That's it in a nutshell. Daniel Day Lewis is an example of somebody like that who stays in character between takes.

I think I'm more the method acting school.

I was always drawn toward the Actor's Studio. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute when I first came to New York. One of my favorite teachers was one of Al [Pachino]'s teachers, a guy named Charlie Laughton, who was just a wonderful, wonderful man.

I took Meisner for a long time. I use a lot of sense memory and, well, I wouldn't say Method, but I can't really avoid getting into character.

I'm not going back to acting class, although I've thought of it. The classic training that people get usually when they start out, I never had, and I always felt and still feel the lack of it, so there's a lot of basic stuff that I just don't have a clue about.

Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor's Studio.

Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books.

Acting is acting.

My mentor Jon Simmons introduced me to the Stanislavski system, which is so heavy on back-story. So you write and write and write these back stories about a character and then you throw it away. So then on set, if it doesn't come, then you didn't do your work.

I studied technique for ten years, from age 7 to 17. I guess you could say I went more on the Stanislavski side than the Meisner side - there's always that wide divide among actors when it comes to technique.

I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold Clurman, and those guys set a very high bar.

There's no such thing as The Method. The term 'method-acting' is so much nonsense. There are many methods, many techniques.

'Whatever it takes' is my opinion of method acting and, indeed, any other kind of acting. Look at Brando and De Niro. But it's not my cup of tea.

You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

There's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work. But it's funny - nobody really sees that. It's perception versus reality, I suppose.

With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.

I didn't learn anything about acting until I joined the Group Theatre. They taught me an entirely new approach, an entirely new technique.