Sonia Moore

Sofia Ezarovna Shatsova Helfand (née Софья Евзаровна Шацова; December 9, 1902 – May 19, 1995), known as Sonia Moore, was a Russian Empire-born American actress, writer and acting teacher.

She is known for simplifying Stanislavski's system of acting devised by Konstantin Stanislavski.

Moore was a student of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and later became an acting teacher.

Moore was born in Gomel, Russian Empire (now Belarus) in 1902, into a Jewish family.

She went to the Moscow Art Theatre's Third Studio to study acting under Russian theatre practitioner Yevgeny Vakhtangov in 1920.

She married Soviet diplomat Lev Borisovich Helfand in Paris in 1926.

They had a daughter, Irene, born in Paris in 1928.

In 1940, she and her husband defected from his posting in Italy to the United States, fearing Stalin's purges if he were to return to Moscow.

They adopted the surname Moore.

After her husband's death in 1957, Sonia decided to open a school of acting to bring the up-dated and revised teachings of Stanislavski in America.

In 1960 her book The Stanislavski Method got published to clarifying the many misunderstandings and distortions surrounding on Stanislavski's theories, which occurred during the development of "Method Acting", which later revised under the title ''The Stanislavski System.

'' she also simplified the method of simple physical action.

in 1961, she founded the Sonia Moore Studio of the Theatre in New York City.