Sanford Meisner

Sanford "Sandy" Meisner (August 31, 1905 – February 2, 1997) was an American actor and acting teacher who developed an approach to acting instruction that is now known as the Meisner technique.

While Meisner was exposed to method acting at the Group Theatre, his approach differed markedly in that he completely abandoned the use of affective memory, a distinct characteristic of method acting.

Meisner maintained an emphasis on "the reality of doing", which was the foundation of his approach.

Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Meisner was the oldest child of Hermann Meisner, a furrier, and Bertha Knoepfler, both Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Hungary.

His younger siblings were Jacob, Ruth, and Robert.

To improve Sanford's health during his youth, his family took a trip to the Catskills.

While there, however, his brother Jacob contracted bovine tuberculosis from drinking unpasteurized milk and died shortly thereafter.

In an interview many years later, Meisner described this event as "the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped."

Because he was unable to cope with feelings of guilt relating to his brother's death, for which his parents blamed him, the young Meisner became isolated and withdrawn.

He found release in playing the family piano and eventually attended the Damrosch Institute of Music (now the Juilliard School), where he studied to become a concert pianist.

When the Great Depression hit, however, his father pulled him out of music school to help with the family business in New York City's Garment District.

Meisner later recalled that his only means of enduring long days spent lugging bolts of fabric was to entertain himself by replaying, in his mind, all the classical piano pieces he had studied in music school.

Meisner believed this experience helped him develop, at age twenty, an acute sense of sound akin to perfect pitch.

Later, as an acting teacher, he often evaluated his students' scene work with his eyes closed and his head dramatically buried in his hands.

This trick was only partly for effect, he explained, because it actually helped him more closely listen to his student's work and pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.

After graduation from high school, Meisner professionally pursued acting, which had interested him since his youth.

He had acted at the Lower East Side's Chrystie Street Settlement House under the direction of Lee Strasberg, who would play an important role in his development.

At age 19 Meisner heard that the Theatre Guild was hiring teenagers and, after a brief interview, was hired as an extra for They Knew What They Wanted.

The experience deeply affected him, leading to the realization that acting had always been his life's ambition.

He and Strasberg both appeared in the original Theatre Guild production of the Rodgers and Hart revue The Garrick Gaieties, from which the song "Manhattan" came.

Sanford Meisner graduated from Erasmus Hall in 1923 and attended The Damrosch Institute of Music (now Juilliard), where he studied to become a concert pianist before talking his way into a job in a Theatre Guild production of Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted.

He realized then that acting which really "dug at him" was what he was looking to find.

Despite his parents' misgivings, Meisner continued to pursue a career in acting, receiving a scholarship to study at the Theatre Guild of Acting.

Here he encountered once again Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.

Strasberg was to become another of the century's most influential acting theorists and the father of method acting, an acting technique derived, like Meisner's own, from the system of Konstantin Stanislavski.

The three became friends.

In 1931, Clurman, Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford (another Theatre Guild member) selected 28 actors (one of whom was Meisner) to form the Group Theatre.

This company exerted an influence on the entire art of acting in the United States.

In 1934, fellow company member Stella Adler returned from private study with Stanislavski in Paris and announced that Stanislavski had come to believe that, as part of a rehearsal process, delving into one's past memories as a source of emotion was only a last resort and that the actor should seek rather to develop the character's thoughts and feelings through physical action, a concentrated use of the imagination, and a belief in the "given circumstances" of the text.

As a result, Meisner began to focus on a new approach to the art of acting.

Meisner summered with the Group Theatre at their 1936 rehearsal headquarters at Pine Brook Country Club in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut.

Meisner, along with a number of other actors in the company, eventually resisted Strasberg's preoccupation with affective memory exercises.

When the Group Theatre disbanded in 1940, Meisner continued as head of the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, at which he had taught since 1935.

In teaching he found a level of fulfillment similar to that which he had found in playing the piano as a child.

At the Playhouse he developed his own form of method acting that was based on Stanislavski's system, Meisner's training with Lee Strasberg, and on Stella Adler's revelations about the uses of the imagination.

Today that approach is called the Meisner technique.

It was during these early years at The

Neighborhood Playhouse that Meisner was briefly married to the young actress Peggy Meredith, who appeared in several Broadway productions.

The Actors Studio was founded in 1947 by two ex-Group Theatre actors Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford.

Strasberg initially had not been asked to join the group, while Meisner was among the first instructors to teach at the studio.