Remembering the Original Method Actors
The story goes back to Czarist Russia. Konstantin Stanislavsky was a stage actor from an aristocratic family. He was born in 1863, but quickly accelerated his life. In 1888, he had founded a literary society and nine years later, founded the Moscow Art Theatre with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stanislavski believed that in approaching emotions on stage, one had to bring up the emotions in his or her life to make that performance real. The Stanislavsky acting method would take hold in the European and American stage in the next century.
Richard Boleslavsky, a protÃ?©gÃ?© of Stanislavsky, founded the American Laboratory Theatre in 1923, the first American institute to forward Stanislavsky’s teachings. Six years later, Lee Strasberg would co-found the Group Theatre, along with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. The Group Theatre looked for new directions in acting, looking at it not just from an artistic angle, but a philosophical one, too. Stella Adler, an associate, was the only person to directly work with Stanislavsky. Adler believed in a strict interpretation of the Stanislavsky method, while Strasberg believed in an adapted approach using past memories. This was just one of the ideological differences that hurt the institute during its brief life. The Group Theatre was intended to bring about the actors as a single entity, the life force behind a production. By the time it closed its doors in 1941, it was a relic to a lost dream. Bickering, Hollywood fame, the stigma of socialism, and war ended the Group Theatre’s existence.
Only one actor from this troupe would come to high fame. John Garfield would arrive in Hollywood late in the 1930s. He is best-remembered for his role alongside Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Garfield’s career came to an end when he was associated with communists and died in 1952. Garfield’s untimely death and his blacklisting in Hollywood prevented him from reaching full fame. Even had the blacklisting never occurred, Garfield was associated with Old Hollywood. He was not a figurehead for a new generation, but a rebel for an old.
Another figure who would influence the next generation was Anthony Quinn. Quinn was born in 1915 in Chihuahua, Mexico. As a young lad, he came to the United States seeking to become an actor. Quinn’s acting career began in the 1930s, after stints in boxing and artistry. He was cast in small, sometimes uncredited roles. He was able to make his place on Broadway with A Streetcar Named Desire. Oddly, despite being considerably older than those who would take center stage in the method movement, his fame didn’t come until his role in Viva Zapata!, a film that starred a man for the new: Marlon Brando. Quinn had a slow start in Hollywood, but his career flourished up until his death in 2001. Among his memorable performances were those in La Strada, Lust for Life, Lawrence of Arabia, and Zorba the Greek.
Hollywood’s first real method actor was Montgomery Clift. Clift, an introvert who had a difficult relationship with his domineering mother, attracted movie studios’ attention while he was on Broadway in the early 1940s. Clift rejected picture deals, choosing to wait for the right part when he was older. Clift’s sincere portrayals were influenced by his stage work alongside Alfred Lunt in There Shall Be No Night. Clift went on to garner further acclaim in The Searching Wind as Broadway’s most promising young star. He made his marks on Hollywood in Red River and The Search in 1948. In Red River, he played a rebellious cowboy who leads a revolt against his cattle rancher stepfather. As a soldier in The Search, Clift would guide a young victim of war to find his lost mother. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences nominated him for an award for that role.
Clift’s life was plagued with torment. He was an alleged homosexual (though his brother claimed him to be bisexual) who had to keep his flings quiet, despite a rep in Tinsel Town. He was an alcoholic and addicted to various sleep aids and pain relievers. Clift managed to endure, leaving his mark in Hollywood history. He starred as a war vet willing to commit murder to make it in life in A Place in the Sun. A Place in the Sun earned Clift his second AMPAS nomination and was his first picture with Elizabeth Taylor. The two would share a life-long friendship. Clift reached his career high with From Here to Eternity as a corporal unwilling to comply with his unit’s corrupt ways. Despite outstanding work, Frank Sinatra would earn top honors by award societies.
Clift’s life came to a turning point during production of Raintree County, his second work with Taylor. On his way back from an evening gathering, he was severely injured in a car crash. His face was damaged, requiring cosmetic surgery that left part of his face paralyzed. Clift would continue to make films, but his body decayed and his face aged rapidly. He took parts in Suddenly, Last Summer (his third film with Elizabeth Taylor), The Young Lions (where he worked with Marlon Brando), and The Misfits (with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe). Clift earned his highest praise for a brief scene in Judgment at Nuremberg as a victim of Nazi tyranny. But his career crashed from litigation over Freud, after a long dispute with director John Huston. Depression, substance abuse, and deteriorating health led to Clift’s death in 1966 from heart failure. He was only forty-five years old, but what was left behind looked decades older. He was wrinkled, gray-haired, and gaunt, a shadow of the handsome face that charmed many just ten years before.
Clift’s contemporary (and rival) was a fellow Midwesterner (he and Clift were both born in Omaha) named Marlon Brando. Brando had come from tumultuous life with alcoholic parents. After a stint in military school, Brando went out on his own and discovered the stage. He showed a talent and was able to learn under the tutelage of Stella Adler, who he remained in appreciation of his whole life. Brando made his spot on Broadway in the mid-1940s. His first film in Hollywood was a small one called The Men, a story about handicapped war veterans. His next film would be his ticket to stardust glory. Brando had made a name for himself in New York City costarring in Tennessee Williams’s tragic play A Streetcar Named Desire. He was cast in the film adaptation, which was written by Oscar Saul and directed by Elia Kazan. Brando played the brutal Stanley, a hardworking, heavy-drinking man who brings Hell upon his mentally ill sister-in-law.
Brando won notice from Hollywood big shots for his powerful presence, unseen even in Clift. Clift had been subtle, quiet on screen. He avoided attention, but garnered it from the pain you could see on his face. Brando was the opposite. He acted on his feelings. Brando’s strong build, volatile temper, and voracious sexual appetite could be seen and felt on a silver screen or at a party; and in the early 1950s, Brando could do no wrong. He saw a meteoric rise, with major films coming in as a deluge. Brando set the rebel youth tone in the 1950s with The Wild One. The fashion in the movie of leather jackets, jeans, caps, and motorcycles were synonymous with the decade’s innocent rebels. On the Waterfront, a story of union corruption on the sea docks, brought Brando him his first honor from the AMPAS.
Brando’s career was not perfect. His casting in Viva Zapata! aroused anger from Mexicans for having an American cast as one of their own. Brando’s foray into Shakespeare with Julius Caesar gave mixed emotions, as did his work in the musical Guys & Dolls. His attempt to play a Japanese in The Teahouse of the August Moon would make him an object of satire for decades. Excess and indulgence led to bad roles and failed romances. Brando became intimately involved in social activism, poisoning his image among some in the public. His reputation for being difficult and egotistical took him off casting lists. His attempt at directing in One-Eyed Jacks was a commercial and critical disaster. His return came thanks to an ambitious director named Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was making a film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s crime novel The Godfather. Coppola, against studio wishes, wanted to cast Brando as the mafia patriarch Vito Corleone. The move turned out to be a good one and Brando’s career was resurrected. That same year, he starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s provocative erotic tragedy Last Tango in Paris.
Brando’s final years were cold ones. His went into seclusion from the outside world living on his own Tahitian island. Over the next three decades, he would balloon in weight, even going so far as to address it in his 1994 memoir Songs My Mother Taught Me. The star’s privacy was interrupted in the 1990s when Brando’s son Christian murdered his sister Cheyenne’s lover over her being abused. Cheyenne committed suicide five years later. Brando would remain distant with the world up until his death in 2004.
Just as Clift was making his way to the silver screen, New York was to see a sequel to the Group Theatre. The Actors Studio was founded in 1947 by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis. With so many youths yearning to explore the full depths of the dramatic arts after the Second World War, this new institute would find the audience its predecessor did not. The Studio would provide aspiring actors a liberal and explorative path in learning the performing arts.
The Studio’s founders and managers knew they had to do whatever they could to keep it alive. This was done through marketing. The Studio claimed to have taught Hollywood’s finest new stars, including Clift and Brando. In reality, most of the stars mentioned attended a single seminar or even less, coming away unimpressed or unchanged. Lee Strasberg came into Studio management in 1951, and entered the directorship the following year. Starsberg would guide the Studio to worldwide fame.
The 1950s would come to be known as America’s renaissance period in the twentieth century. The country was pure, prosperity was widespread (or so it seemed), and there was hope and optimism for the future, despite the concerns brought about by the Cold War. From this period came the second generation of Hollywood’s method actors. The most identifiable person associated with this era was another Midwestern farm boy named James Dean.
He had been raised by a loving aunt and uncle after his mother had died when he was just a child. Dean displayed an interest in the arts, but showed no extraordinary talent. He made his way to attend college in Southern California, but found life hard and jobs few. He made his way to New York where he was able to find some employment on stage and television. He had attended a few sessions at the Actors Studio, but stormed out after receiving criticism from his instructor. Dean displayed a soft obsession for Brando and Clift, going so far as to make phone calls late in the evening for unusual chats.
Dean’s career took off after playing a gay Arab servant in AndrÃ?© Gide’s The Immoralist. He was offered the role of Cal Trask in the screen version of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a story about a young man trying to earn the affection of his father. Dean competed with another rising star: Paul Newman. Newman, Dean, and an actor named Steve McQueen spent the 1950s in rivalry for television and film spots. There would be a cruel irony of it all.
For Dean, East of Eden was a triumph. He was able to work with Elia Kazan, the man who directed Marlon Brando. Dean’s powerful work in the Steinbeck tale impressed Warner Bros. to cast him as a troubled teen in Rebel Without a Cause. Rebel Without a Cause had a shaky history. It was written in the Forties by Robert Lindner about psychopathic analysis. Warner management shelved a script for it, but it received a second glance the next decade amidst the rising coverage of teenage violence in the suburbs. The lead was first offered to Brando in 1947, but the project collapsed. Its resurrection was owed to Nicholas Ray (the director), Irving Schulman, and Stewart Stern.
After filming finished, Dean went on to do what would become his final film: Giant. Again, he got to work with a man who directed one of his idols: George Stevens. Stevens directed Clift in A Place in the Sun, a movie Dean held to his heart. Dean was also working with Elizabeth Taylor, who he shared a strong kinship with. Despite difficulties during the long production, Dean managed to make it through fine. Giant was intended to be the epic of the decade, a story telling of change in Texas. History was to remember it less kindly as the last picture of a rising star.
Dean’s next project was the boxing story Somebody Up There Likes Me. He was cast alongside Pier Angeli (his former flame) and Sal Mineo (his costar in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant). Before shooting, Dean pursued his passion for racing and headed out for a competition in Salinas with his new Porsche. On the way to the race, Dean collided with a large sedan making an illegal turn. Not long after his death, Rebel Without a Cause hit theatresâÂ?¦and so began a legend.
Dean’s death was a tragic end to the romance of the old method actor. He would not be the last. Paul Newman was to take Dean’s role in Somebody Up There Likes Me. He reached full stardom in Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958. His career sailed with The Hustler (1961), Cool Hand Like (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and The Sting (1973). Newman’s career reached its peak in 1960s. Newman played a prisoner standing up to authority in Cool Hand Luke, a character that resonated in American culture at the time. His close association with Robert Redford created the most acclaimed movie duo in Hollywood. Newman one-upped his former rival, James Dean, by having a long and successful career in professional racing. Newman changed the political climate in Hollywood when he openly spoke out about America’s war effort to preserve the Saigon government in Southeast Asia.
Among those that would follow after, there would not be the same glamour shared with those from before. Old Hollywood, with its iron-fisted control and security, was forever gone. New Hollywood challenged the values of what came before. While it glamorized the past, it was the opposite of it in every way. The beautiful and handsome movie star was gone, in favor of the one that provided something deeper to the screen. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, and Meryl Streep would lead the “new” Hollywood, carrying the spirit that had driven Brando and Clift in the 1950s. Backed by a new breed of creative filmmakers, Hollywood was resuscitated in the 1970s. No longer held back by the Production Code Administration, cinema was unbound by what was considered polite or decent.
So ended an era.
