LEE STRASBERG

"THE ACTOR AND THE STUDIO"

«The world has never given actors more than it gives them today - monetarily and socially on a worldwide basis. Actors are among the best known people in the world. The faces, the images of actors are better known than the faces of our great statesmen or scientists. But it is true, too, that the actual conditions of work are for the actor extremely poor.

The actor works, let's say, on a movie. It takes him months. He works in a disjointed way that hardly permits his imagination to be aroused. Then he loafs around because he's glad to loaf around after getting up all those months at six o'clock in the morning and finishing at six at night. He gets pretty tired. Then he does another picture somewhere else. Or, if he goes into a play, he works for a couple of weeks under the worst possible conditions, much more concerned with lines and positions than with really working on the play. Then the play comes into New York, and he has to run through it every night, the same play every night. The burden of a long run would have been an impossible task for any actor in the old days. It was the fact that they played different parts and therefore could revivify their imagination unconsciously that made it possible for great actors to develop, as great actors have developed, in the past. For twenty years they played the same part, but only a few times each year, and at the end of that period they could really mean it when they said, "Now I'm beginning to realize how the part should be played".

Sometimes the acting process is complicated by the fact that at the very time when you misuse your talent you are externally successful. Or at a time when you make an effort to use your talent in the proper way, you may be unsuccessful from an audience point of view. It's precisely at those moments that we need a place with an audience, not only observing from the viewpoint of simple enjoyment but able to perceive work in progress, work that may lead to something. Every time an actor changes from something he is used to to something he is not used to is fraught with danger and often with unsuccess. Even if the new thing is not well done, it may lead to a much more successful doing than anything done before. It is in that area that membership here is offered.

The Studio is a place where whatever problems actors have as actors can be worked on, can be solved. Among ourselves we sometimes say this is a place where you can fall flat on your face. When we take people in, the primary thing we judge is talent, though I must honestly say that we directors have never found a way of defining exactly how that judgment is reached. Nonetheless, it is talent which entitles an individual to come into The Actors Studio. We hope that the people here are not any more deserving than others, but are deserving of our effort to encourage them to find the things within them that will constantly lead toward the further development of their talent. But too many of the members take their admission as a token of being singled out as better than other people, and, while I don't mind anybody on the outside thinking that, it is not really true.»