Sanford Meisner
Sanford Meisner (born
August 31,
1905 in
New York City, died
February 2,
1997 in
Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California) was an actor and a teacher of acting. As a young child, Meisner's brother Jacob died from tuberculosis. Meisner credited the incident as a "dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped." A founding member of the
Group Theatre in
New York during the 1930s and 1940s, he went on to teach at the
Neighborhood Playhouse for more than 50 years. He developed the
Meisner Technique of acting.
The goal of the
Meisner technique is to get actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Built on the work of
Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of the
Stanislavski System and grandfather of
Lee Strasberg's
Method Acting, Meisner's work encourages a more specifically active, "moment-to-moment" spontaneity.
Some prominent actors who trained at The Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner are
Jeff Goldblum,
Robert Duvall,
Diane Keaton,
James Caan,
Steve McQueen,
Grace Kelly,
Gregory Peck,
Joanne Woodward,
Allison Janney,
Mary Steenburgen, and
James Doohan.
In addition to his fame as a teacher, Meisner also gained considerable acclaim as an actor. He appeared in numerous productions of the
Group Theater. He appeared in such productions as
Awake and Sing!,
Paradise Lost, and
Golden Boy as well as an assortment of film and television roles.
Meisner's last acting role was as Joseph Klein in a 1995 episode of
ER, "Sleepless in Chicago".
Noah Wyle later said that the scene in which his character,
Dr. John Carter, reads a poem to Klein on his deathbed was one of the highlights of his career, since he got to work with the legend.
Note:Today, the Meisner technique of acting is still taught today in schools around the world. One famous "game" that he invented occurs between two people. The objective is to spontaneously make general statements about the other person, such as "Your eyes are blue". The other person would then say "My eyes are blue", and the phrase would be repeated in this manner over and over until the statement is changed,
but not for the sake of change!-as Meisner would stress. This is a common, basic game, known as
repetition, that warms up the amateur actor.
Meisner died in
Los Angeles, aged 91.
"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!'"
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Tender is the Night (
1962)
The Story on Page One (1959)
Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre's Best Kept Secret (1985)
