Sanford Meisner (August 31, 1905 – February 2, 1997) was an American actor and acting coach well known for the Meisner Technique.

Early life

Meisner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the oldest son of a family of Jewish immigrants that came to the United States from Hungary. Two years later, his younger brother Jacob, who would come to have a lasting effect on Meisner, was born. In an attempt to improve Sanford's health, one year later, the family took a trip to the Catskills, where Jacob was fed unpasteurized milk. As a result, the child contracted bovine tuberculosis and died shortly thereafter. In an interview many years later, Meisner would identify this event as “the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped.”^[1] Having been blamed by his parents for his brother's death, the young Meisner would soon become isolated and withdrawn, unable to cope with feelings of responsibility for his brother’s death.

He found release in playing the family piano, and eventually attended the Damrosch Institute of Music. When the Depression hit, Meisner's father pulled him out of music school to help in the family business in New York City's garment district. Meisner would later recall that the only way he could endure 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 an acute sense of sound, akin to perfect pitch. Later, when he became a famous acting teacher, he would often evaluate his students' scene work with his eyes closed (and his head dramatically buried in his hands). This trick was only partly for effect; the habit, he explained, actually helped him to listen more closely to his students' work, and to pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.

After graduating high school, Meisner pursued the idea of acting professionally, which had followed him since his youth. At 19, he learned that the Theatre Guild was hiring teenagers, and he jumped at the opportunity. After a brief interview, he was hired as an extra for They Knew What They Wanted. The experience deeply affected him, and he began to realize that acting was what he had been looking for in life.

The Group Theatre

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 would meet two fellow theatre lovers who would change his life entirely, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. Strasberg was to become another of the century’s most influential acting theorists and the father of Method Acting. The three became friends. In 1931, Clurman and Strasberg, joined by Cheryl Crawford (another Theatre Guild member) would select 28 actors, one of whom was Meisner, to form the Group Theatre. This theatre would come to exert a profound influence, not only on Meisner, but on the entire art of American acting.

After working with the Group Theatre through the 1940s, Meisner went on to become a teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. It was in teaching that he found a level of fulfillment similar to playing the piano as a child. It was at the Playhouse that he would develop his own acting technique, based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and his old friend Lee Strasberg, called the Meisner Technique.

The Meisner Technique

As a teacher, Meisner was brilliant. His techniques were both unorthodox and effective. Actor Dennis Longwell wrote of sitting in on one of Meisner’s classes one day, when Meisner brought two students forward for an acting exercise. They were given a single line of dialogue, told to turn away, and instructed not to do or say anything until something happened to make them say the words; one of the fundamental principles of the Meisner Technique. The first student’s line came when Meisner approached him from behind and gave him a strong pinch on the back, inspiring him to jump away and yelp his line in pain. The other student’s line came when Meisner reached around and slipped his hand into her blouse. Her line came out as a giggle as she moved away from his touch.^[2] His techniques, while somewhat unusual, were extremely effective.

The goal of the Meisner technique has often been described as getting actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”^[3] The technique emphasizes carrying out an action truthfully on stage and letting emotion and subtext build based on the truth of the action and on the other characters around them, rather than simply playing an action or emotion. One of the most well known exercises of the Meisner Technique is called Repetition. In Repetition, one person would spontaneously make a comment based on their partner’s behavior, and that phrase would be repeated back and forth between the two in the same manner until it changed on its own. The objective was always to react truthfully and not merely change because it felt like change was called for.

Throughout his career, Meisner worked with and taught a great wealth of important names, including actors such as James Caan, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Bob Fosse, Jon Voight, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Kelly, and Sydney Pollack who together with Charles E. Conrad would serve as Meisner's senior assistants. Writers such as Arthur Miller and David Mamet also studied with Meisner. Though he rarely appeared on film, he performed in Tender Is the Night, The Story on Page One, and Mikey and Nicky. His last acting role was in an episode of the television medical drama ER, an episode which actor Noah Wyle referred to as the highlight of his career. Meisner’s work is almost universally admired, and he has been regarded as one of the most important acting theorists of the 20th century.

Meisner moved to California in his eighth decade of life and opened The Sanford Meisner Center in 1995. As passionate as ever, Meisner was determined to turn the 60 seat theater into a lively school where Meisner graduates would interact with other artists. His school still exists today under the direction of his long time partner Jimmy Carville and is run by his protégé Martin Barter and Alex Cole Taylor.

Sanford Meisner died at the age of 91.

Famous Meisner quotes

"Acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances."

"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!'"

"Acting can be fun. Don't let it get around."

External links

• Sanford Meisner at the Internet Movie Database

Notes and references

Other sources

• Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre’s Best Kept Secret. Dir. Nick Doob. Perf. Sanford Meisner, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Sydney Pollack. 1985.

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