Lee Strasberg

Lee Strasberg
File:Lee Strasberg.jpg in Godfather II (1974)
Born	Israel Lee Strassberg
Spouse(s)	Nora Krecaun Paula Miller Anna Mizrahi
Awards	Pasinetti Award for Best Actor 1979 Going in Style Walk of Fame - Motion Picture 6777 Hollywood Blvd

Lee Strasberg (November 17, 1901 – February 17, 1982) was an American actor, director, and one of the best-known and most important acting teachers in the history of American theater and film. He cofounded, with director Elia Kazan, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was "America’s first true theatrical collective". In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school," and was chief proponent of "Method acting" from the 1920s until his death in 1982.

Acting historian Jeremy Butler wrote, "The one man most responsible for 'the Method' becoming the dominant technique of screen acting in the United States was Lee Strasberg: popularizer of the term 'the Method'." He refined, synthesized, and eventually disseminated the teachings of Stanislavski to his Actors Studio students. From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Franchot Tone, Gene Wilder, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino and director Elia Kazan.

Strasberg explained his "Method" through his class lectures and writings: "The two areas of discovery that were of primary importance in my work at the Actors Studio and in my private classes where improvisation and 'affective memory,'... the process of contacting one’s memories of emotions in order to channel them into a role... It is finally by using these techniques that the actor can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character" Although Marlon Brando also studied "Method" acting, but under Stella Adler, Elia Kazan directed him in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954,) where he came to epitomize "Method" acting in the public’s mind. Kazan also directed another student, James Dean, in East of Eden (1955), for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. Dean once wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest school of the theater [and] the best thing that can happen to an actor."

"As a teacher and acting theorist, Strasberg revolutionized American actor training," writes author Milly Barranger. "Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of psychological truthfulness." Elia Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. . . He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them 'permanent.'" Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors.

Early years

Lee Strasberg was born Israel Strasserg in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Budaniv, Ukraine) to Jewish parents, Baruch Meyer Strassberg and Ida Diner, and was the youngest of three sons. His father immigrated to New York while his family remained in their home village with an uncle, a rabbinical teacher. The father, who worked as a presser in the garment industry, sent first for his eldest son and his daughter. Finally, enough money was saved to bring over his wife and his two remaining sons. In 1909 the family was reunited on Manhattan's Lower East Side where they lived until the early twenties.

Lee found himself isolated in a country whose language he didn't speak, and was emotioinally distant from overworked parents who had neither time nor inclination for intimacy. He took refuge in voracious reading and the companionship of his older brother, Zalmon. Zalmon's death in the influenza epidemic of 1918 was so traumatic for the young Strasberg that, despite being a straight-A student, he dropped out of high school. A brother-in-law eventually introduced him to the theater by giving him a small part in a Yiddish-language production that was being performed by the Progressive Drama Club. He later joined the Chrystie Street Settlement House’s drama club. Philip Loeb, casting director of the Theater Guild, sensed that Strasberg could act, although he was not yet thinking of a fulltime acting career, and was still working as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper for a wig company. When he was twenty-three years old, however, Lee enrolled in the Clare Tree Major School of the Theater.

His "life-shaping revelation"

Kazan biographer Richard Schickel described Strasberg's first experiences to the "art" of acting:

"He dropped out of high school, worked in a shop that made hairpieces, drifted into the theater via a settlement house company and … had his life-shaping revelation when Stanislavsky brought his Moscow Art Theatre to the United States in 1923. He had seen good acting before, of course, but never an ensemble like this with actors completely surrendering their egos to the work.

"He observed, first of all, that all the actors, whether they were playing leads or small parts, worked with the same commitment and intensity. No actors idled about posing and preening (or thinking about where they might dine after the performance). More important, every actor seemed to project some sort of unspoken, yet palpable, inner life for his or her character. This was acting of a sort that one rarely saw on the American stage . . . where there was little stress on the psychology of the characters or their interactions.

"Strasberg was galvanized. He knew that his own future as an actor – he was a slight and unhandsome man – was limited. But he soon perceived that as a theoretician and teacher of this new “system” it might become a major force in American theater."

He eventually left the Clare Tree Major School to study with students of Stanislavsky – Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavsky – at the American Laboratory Theater. In 1925 Strasberg had his first professional appearance in Processional, a play produced by the Theater Guild.

According to Schickel, "What Strasberg … took away from the Actor’s Lab was a belief that just as an actor could be prepared physically for his work with dance, movement and fencing classes, he could be mentally prepared by resort to analogous mental exercises. They worked on relaxation as well as concentration. They worked with nonexistent objects that helped prepare them for the exploration of equally ephemeral emotions. They learned to used “affective memory,” as Strasberg called the most controversial aspect of his teaching – summoning emotions from their own lives to illuminate their stage roles. . . Strasberg believed he could codify this system, a necessary precursor to teaching it to anyone who wanted to learn it. . . . He became a director more preoccupied with getting his actors to work in the “correct” way than he was in shaping the overall presentation.

Acting director and teacher

Group Theater

He gained a reputation with the Theater Guild of New York and helped form the Group Theater in New York in 1931. There, he created a technique which became known as "the Method" or "method acting." His teaching style owed much to the Russian director, Stanislavsky, whose book, An Actor Prepares, dealt with the psychology of interpretation in acting. He began by directing, but his time was gradually taken up by the training of actors. Called "America’s first true theatrical collective," the Lab immediately offered a few tuition-free scholarships for its three-year program to "promising students."

Widely considered America's finest acting ensemble during the 1930s, "the Group Theatre," wrote Publishers Weekly, "with its self-defined mission to reconnect theater to the world of ideas and actions, staged plays that confronted social and moral issues... with members Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella and Luther Adler, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan and an ill-assorted band of idealistic actors living hand to mouth are seen welded in a collective of creativity that was also a tangle of jealousies, love affairs and explosive feuds." Playwright Arthur Miller said "the Group Theatre was unique and probably will never be repeated. For awhile it was literally the voice of Depression America."

Actors Studio

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Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio

In 1947, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, also members of the Group Theatre, started the Actors Studio as a non-profit workshop for professional and aspiring actors to concentrate on their craft away from the pressures of the commercial theatre. Strasberg assumed leadership of the studio in 1951 as its artistic director. "As a teacher and acting theorist, he revolutionized American actor training and engaged such remarkable performers as Kim Hunter, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Al Pacino." Since its inception the Studio has been a nonprofit educational corporation chartered by the state of New York, and has been supported entirely by contributions and benefits." Strasberg stated in 1959, "We have here the possibility of creating a kind of theatre that would be a shining medal for our country."

UCLA acting teacher Robert Hethmon writes, "The Actors Studio is a refuge. Its privacy is guarded ferociously against the casual intruder, the seeker of curiousities, and the exploiter...The Studio helps actors to meet the enemy within....and contributes greatly to Strasberg's utterly pragmatic views on training the actor and solving his problems.... and is kept deliberately modest in its circumstances, its essence being the private room where Lee Strasberg and some talented actors can work."

Admission to the Actors Studio was usually by audition with more than a thousand actors auditioning each year and the directors usually conferring membership on only five or six each year.

Al Pacino

"The Actors Studio meant so much to me in my life. Lee Strasberg hasn’t been given the credit he deserves. Brando doesn’t give Lee any credit ... Next to Charlie [ Charles Laughton ], it sort of launched me. It really did. That was a remarkable turning point in my life. It was directly responsible for getting me to quit all those jobs and just stay acting."

In a 2007 interview with acting writer James Lipton, Pacino said, "Lee and I became very close friends. But before that, he was very imposing. He had an aura about him, and it was good for the Studio, because there was a distance between him and everybody else, and it had a real power. It was exciting to work for him because he was so interesting when he talked about a scene or talked about people. One would just want to hear him talk, because things he would say, you’d never heard before. . . . He had such a great understanding . . . he loved actors so much."

Marlon Brando

"Movie stars spawned by Strasberg’s Actors Studio were of a new type which is often labeled the "rebel hero." … Brando was trained primarily by Stella Adler, a former member of the Group Theatre who had a falling out with Strasberg over his interpretations of Stanislavsky’s ideas."

James Dean

According to James Dean biographer W. Bast, "Proud of this accomplishment, Dean referred to the studio in a 1952 letter, when he was 21 years old, to his family as 'The greatest school of the theater. It houses great people like Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Mildred Dunnock . . . Very few get into it . . . It is the best thing that can happen to an actor. I am one of the youngest to belong.' "

Marilyn Monroe

Film author Maurice Zolotow wrote, "Between Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot only four years elapsed, but her world had changed. She had become one of the most celebrated personalities in the world. She had divorced Joe Di Maggio. She had married Arthur Miller. She had become a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She was seriously studying acting. She was reading good books."

Teaching methods and philosophy

In describing his teaching philosophy, Strasberg wrote, "The two areas of discovery that were of primary importance in my work at the Actors Studio and in my private classes where improvisation and affective memory. It is finally by using these techniques that the actor can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character"

Improvisation and "affective memory"

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teaching at the Actors Studio

Strasberg explained the importance of improvisation and the central concept of "affective memory:" the "process of contacting one’s memories of emotions in order to channel them into a role." Affective memory originated with Stanislavski, was nurtured by Richard Boleslavski, Strasberg’s teacher at the American Laboratory Theatre in the 1920s, and was further refined by Strasberg. Acting historian Jeremy Butler writes, "Strasberg divides "affective memory" into the recall of sensations (sights, sounds, smells, and so on) and that of feelings (horror, sadness, pleasure, and so on.) The actor, he explains, uses the former, his or her sense memory, to stimulate the latter, his or her emotional memory, which can then be used in the context of a particular character." The Method, Strasberg states, is "the procedure by which the actor can use his "affective memory" to create a reality on stage."

According to Don Bigsby, in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, "Strasberg was a scientist of acting, fascinated by the mysteries of the actor’s quest for true emotion. And in a technique called affective memory, … Strasberg believed he had found a reliable aid for achieving it. … What Strasberg prized about the technique was that the actor would be using true emotion – his own reawakened real-life feelings – to color and deepen his performance. . . Maintaining that the technique was the surest way of achieving the style of psychological realism the Group was searching for, Strasberg placed it as the foundation of his work."

The purpose of "affective memory" is to release emotions on stage. Strasberg states:

"The basic idea of affective memory is not emotional recall but that the actor’s emotion on the stage should never be really real. It always should be only remembered emotion. An emotion that happens right now spontaneously is out of control – you don’t know what’s going to happen from it, and the actor can’t always maintain and repeat it. Remembered emotion is something that the actor can create and repeat: without that the thing is hectic."

For Strasberg, affective memory is the basic element of the actor’s reality. In particular, it draws out the emotions from the past that are ingrained in one’s mind and body:

"The emotional value of the experience may have changed. However, by attempting a lot of affective memories, the actor gradually obtains a stock of memories that are permanent and become easier to invoke as he continues to use them. … The significance lies in the fact that the actor becomes emotionally available, prepared to respond instantly and expressively with feelings and passions."

Private moments

Strasberg’s also devised the teaching concept of "private moment," where the actor lives out their private moments before a classroom audience. Private moment is the literal performance of an activity that one does in private. According to Doug Moston, it was developed by Strasberg in 1956 and 1957 "to aid actors in creating the ability to behave in a truly private fashion while being observed by an audience." … Working from private experience, the actor is free, as Strasberg put it, ‘to sit before us, to smell an aroma, and not to do anything physical, but to focus only on what you’re doing with your concentration..’"

Methods of teaching

File:Actors Studio Cover.jpg

Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his approach in this way:

"The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage."

Elia Kazan as student

In Elia Kazan's autobiography, the Academy Award-winning director wrote about his earliest memories of Strasberg as teacher:

"He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. He was the center of the camp’s activities that summer, the core of the vortex. Everything in camp revolved around him. Preparing to direct the play that was to open the coming season, as he had the three plays of the season before, he would also give the basic instruction in acting, laying down the principles of the art by which the Group worked, the guides to their artistic training. He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, made them "permanent." He did this not only by his superior knowledge but by the threat of his anger.

"… He enjoyed his eminence just as the admiral would. Actors are as self-favoring as the rest of humanity, and perhaps the only way they could be held together to do their work properly was by the threat of an authority they respected. And feared. No one questioned his dominance – he spoke holy writ – his leading role in that summer’s activities, and his right to all power. To win his favor became everyone’s goal. His explosions of temper maintained the discipline of this camp of high-strung people. I came to believe that without their fear of this man, the Group would fly apart, everyone going in different directions instead of to where he was pointing.

"I was afraid of him too. Even as I admired him. Lee was making an artistic revolution and knew it. An organization such as the Group – then in its second year, which is to say still beginning, still being shaped – lives only by the will of a fanatic and the drive with which he propels his vision. He has to be unswerving, uncompromising, and unadjustable. Lee knew this. He’d studied other revolutions, political and artistic. He knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his mission and its importance."

Burgess Meredith remembers

Before becoming a student at the Actors Studio, actor Burgess Meredith sat in to watch a teaching session and recalls his impressions:

"What followed was extraordinary. In a concise 25-minute speech Lee evaluated what the actors had and had not accomplished from the audience’s point of view. His words were meaningful, unhesitant, precise. His speech had form … was even, his syntax faultless. No matter how long the sentence, it came out swiftly, nearly perfect. Thinking on his feet, without missing a beat, Lee sized up the effort and evaluated the results. He intertwined humor, praise, reproval, rationale and, once in a while, a touch of rabbinical wisdom."

Classroom settings

Kazan also described his classes:

"At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised the first exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor’s arousing his inner temperament. The essential and rather simple technique, which has since then been complicated by teachers of acting who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he has emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the materials of his art.

"Lee taught his actors to launch their work on every scene by taking a minute to remember the details surrounding the emotional experience in their lives that would correspond to the emotion of the scene they were about to play. 'Take a minute!' became the watchword of that summer, the phrase heard most often, just as this particular kind of inner concentration became the trademark of Lee’s own work when he directed a production. His actors often appeared to be in a state of self-hypnosis."

On James Dean

James Dean in East of Eden

In 1956, Strasberg student James Dean, already nominated for two Oscars, died in a sports-car accident at the age of 24. Strasberg, during a regular lecture shortly after this accident, discussed Dean. The following are excerpts from a transcription of the recorded lecture:

(In the middle of his lecture on another topic) “To hell with it! I hadn’t planned to say this, because I don’t know how I’ll behave when I say it; I don’t think it will bother me. But I saw Jimmy Dean in Giant the other night, and I must say that – (he weeps.) You see, that’s what I was afraid of. (A long pause.) When I got in the cab, I cried. … What I cried at was the waste, the waste.

"If there is anything in the theatre to which I respond more than anything else – maybe I’m getting old, or maybe I’m getting sentimental – it is the waste in the theatre, the talent that gets up and the work that goes into getting it up and getting it where it should be. And then when it gets there, what the hell happens with it? The senseless destruction, the senseless waste, the hopping about from one thing to the next, the waste of the talent, the waste of your lives, the strange kind of behavior that not just Jimmy had, you see, but that a lot of you here have and a lot of other actors have that are going through exactly the same thing. … As soon as you grow up as actors, as soon as you reach a certain place, there it goes, the drunkenness and the rest of it, as if, now that you’ve really made it, the incentive goes, and something happens which to me is just terrifying. I don’t know what to do.

"The only answer possibly is that we somehow here find a way, a means, an organization, a plan which should really contribute to the theatre, so that there should not only be the constant stimulus to your individual development, which I think we have provided, but also that once your individual development is established, it should then actually contribute to the theatre, rather than to an accidental succession of good, bad, or indifferent things. But I am very, very scared that despite how strongly I feel, or despite how stimulated you become, nothing will be done….and we will just continue to get so caught up that in a strange way we do not really live our lives. . . .

"To me that is the future of the Studio, that a unified body of people should somehow be connected with a tangible, consistent, and continuous effort. That is the dream I have always had. That is what got me into theatre in the first place. That was the thing that got me involved in The Actors Studio….and now it becomes time to think a little bit more about our responsibility for that individual talent. … I’m stuck. I don’t know. And this is really the problem of the Studio."

Watch James Dean movie clips

in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953

On Marilyn Monroe

In 1962, one of Strasberg's most successful students, Marilyn Monroe, died at the age of 36 as a result of probable suicide. She was at the height of her career. In 1999 she was ranked the sixth greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute. Strasberg gave the eulogy at her funeral:
Watch videos funeral

(excerpt)

For us, Marilyn was a devoted and loyal friend – a colleague constantly reaching for perfection. We shared her pain and difficulties, and some of her joys. She was a member of our family.

It is difficult to accept the fact that her zest for life has been ended by this dreadful accident. Despite the heights and brilliance she had attained on the screen, she was planning for the future. She was looking forward to participating in the many exciting things. In her eyes, and in mine, her career was just beginning. . . .

She had a luminous quality. A combination of wistfulness, radiance, and yearning that set her apart and made everyone wish to be part of it - to share in the childish naivete which was at once so shy and yet so vibrant.

Personal life

Marriages

His first marriage was to Nora Krecaun in 1926 until her death three years later in 1929. In 1934 he married actress and drama coach Paula Miller until her death from cancer in 1966. They were the parents of acting teacher John Strasberg and actress Susan Strasberg. His third wife was the former Anna Mizrahi and the mother of his two youngest children, Adam Lee and David Lee Israel.

Death and commemoration

The rock at Lee Strasberg's grave at Westchester Hills Cemetery

On February 17, 1982, Lee Strasberg died of a heart attack in New York City at the age of 80. He was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Actress Ellen Burstyn recalls that time:

"Late in the evening, I wandered into the greenroom and saw Lee sitting next to Anna, watching the taping on the monitor. I sat next to him and we chatted a little. Lee wasn’t one for small talk, so I didn’t stay long. But before I got up, I said, 'Lee, I’ve been asked to run for president of Actors Equity.' He reached over and patted me on the back, 'That’s wonderful, dahling. Congratulations.' Those were the last words he ever said to me.

"Two days later, early in the morning, I was still asleep when the door to my bedroom opened. I woke up and saw my friend and assistant, Katherine Cortez, enter the room and walk toward me. . . 'We just got a call. Lee Strasberg died.'

"No, no, no," I wailed, over and over. 'I’m not ready,' and pulled the covers over my head. I had told myself that I must be prepared for this, but I was not prepared. What was I to do now? Who would I work for when I was preparing for a role? Who would I go to when I was in trouble?

"His memorial service was held at the Shubert Theater where A Chorus Line was playing. Lee’s coffin was brought down the aisle and placed center stage. Everybody in the theater world came – actors, writers, directors, producers, and most, if not all, his students. He was a giant of the theater and was deeply mourned. Those of us who had the great good fortune to be fertilized and quickened by his genius would feel the loss of him for the rest of our lives."

Legacy

Influence on American films

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Al Pacino and Lee Strasberg in scene from 1979 film And Justice for All

"Whether directly influenced by Strasberg or not," wrote acting author Pamela Wojcik, "the new male stars all to some degree or other adapted Method techniques to support their identification as rebels. . . He recreates romance as a drama of male neuroticism and also invests his characterization “with an unprecedented aura of verisimilitude."

Acting teacher and author Alison Hodge explains: "Seemingly spontaneous, intuitive, brooding, 'private,' lit with potent vibrations from an inner life of conflict and contradiction, their work exemplified the style of heightened naturalism which (whether Brando agrees or not) Lee Strasberg devoted his life to exploring and promoting." Pamela Wojcik adds, "Because of their tendency to substitute their personal feelings for those of the characters they were playing, Actors Studio performers were well suited to become Hollywood stars. . . In short, Lee Strasberg transformed a socialistic, egalitarian theory of acting into a celebrity-making machine."

"It does not matter who 'invented' Marlon Brando," writes Hodge, "or how regularly or faithfully he, Dean, or Clift attended the Studio or studied the Method at the feet of Lee Strasberg. In their signature roles – the most influential performances in the history of American films – these three performers revealed new kinds of body language and new ways of delivering dialogue. In the pauses between words, in the language 'spoken' by their eyes and faces, they gave psychological realism an unprecedented charge. Verbally inarticulate, they were eloquent 'speakers' of emotion. Far less protective of their masculinity than earlier film actors, they enacted emotionally wounded and vulnerable outsiders struggling for self-understanding, and their work shimmered with a mercurial neuroticism. . . . The Method-trained performers in films of the fifties added an enhanced verbal and gesture naturalism and a more vivid inner life."

In 1966, Strasberg established the "Actors Studio West" in Los Angeles and in 1969, he began the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles. Today, co-presidents Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors. In 1974, at the suggestion of his former student Al Pacino, Strasberg acted in a key supporting role alongside Pacino in Godfather II and again in the 1979 film, And Justice for All.

Notes

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Lee Strasberg and Ellen Burstyn at his 80th birthday party in 1981

Work on Broadway

Note: All works are plays and the original productions unless otherwise noted.

• Four Walls (1927) - Actor
• The Vegetable (1929) - Director
• Red Rust (1929) - Actor
• Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) - Actor
• The House of Connelly (1931) - Co-Director
• 1931 (1931) - Director
• Success Story (1932) - Director
• Men in White (1933) - Director
• Gentlewoman (1934) - Director
• Gold Eagle Guy (1934) - Director
• Paradise Lost (1935) - Produced by Group Theatre
• Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936) - Director, Produced by Group Theatre
• Johnny Johnson (1936) - Director, Produced by Group Theatre
• Many Mansions (1937) - Director
• Golden Boy (1937) - Produced by Group Theatre
• Roosty (1938) - Director
• Casey Jones (1938) - Produced by Group Theatre
• All the Living (1938) - Director
• Dance Night (1938) - Director
• Rocket to the Moon (1938) - Produced by Group Theatre
• The Gentle People (1939) - Produced by Group Theatre
• Awake and Sing! (1939), revival - Produced by Group Theatre
• Summer Night (1939) - Director
• Night Music (1940) - Produced by Group Theatre
• The Fifth Column (1940) - Director
• Clash by Night (1941) - Director
• A Kiss for Cinderella (1942), revival - Director
• R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1942), revival - Director
• Apology (1943) - Producer and Director
• South Pacific (1943, apparently no relation to the Broadway musical South Pacific) - Director
• Skipper Next to God (1948) - Director
• The Big Knife (1949) - Director
• The Closing Door (1949) - Director
• The Country Girl (1950) - Co-Producer
• Peer Gynt (1951), (revival) - Director
• Strange Interlude (1963), (revival) - Produced by The Actors Studio - Tony Award Co-nomination for Best Producer of a Play
• Marathon '33 (1963) - Production supervisor
• The Three Sisters (1964), (revival) - Director, Produced by The Actors Studio

See also

• Method acting

External links

• Official website
• Strasberg video lectures]
• The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute
• Lee Strasberg at IMDb
• Lee Strasberg at the Internet Broadway Database
• John Strasberg Studios
• Photo & Gravesite
• Audio Interview with Lee Strasberg on WGBH