In the 1950s, a new kind of screen performance exploded in the movies. Stars like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean electrified audiences with a style that was both naturalistic and intense and could erupt in moments of volcanic emotion. Fresh and exciting and revelatory, it felt realistic next to the conventions of screen acting that audiences were used to. It became known as "the Method" and its adherents were Method Actors.
Brando and Clift—and many others over the decades, from Julie Harris and Paul Newman to Al Pacino and Jane Fonda—learned their craft at The Actors Studio in New York, but the roots of the Method reach back to Russian actor, director and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski in the early 20th century. Where other acting schools emphasized the external, learning to speak and move in ways to create character and project their emotions, the Stanislavski Method was grounded in the internal. He taught actors to analyze text, to understand the motivation of their characters and to draw upon sense memories to better connect with the emotions of the moment. His teachings were adopted and adapted by the Group Theatre in the 1930s, which became a laboratory for a new approach to American acting, and further developed by The Actors Studio, formed in 1947 by veterans the Group Theatre.
The non-profit organization soon became the most esteemed and exclusive acting school in the country under the leadership of Lee Strasberg, but it wasn't the only Method in town. Stella Adler, another founding member of the Group Theatre, opened her own acting studio with an alternative approach to Stanislavski's ideas. Acting teacher Sanford Meisner incorporated their ideas with his own insights to develop the Meisner technique. The Actors Studio founded a West Coast school in Los Angeles and acting schools around the country absorbed elements of the Method in their own programs.
TCM pays tribute to this distinctly American style of performance with two nights of features spotlighting some of the most celebrated students of the Method.
Before Brando cried out for Stella or Clift struggled to find his place in the sun, Group Theatre star John Garfield made the leap from stage to screen and carved out a career in Hollywood specializing in tough, scrappy, working-class characters with a kind of street-smart sass and a chip on his shoulder. Director and theater historian Isaac Butler called Garfield "the first Method film star," the actor who first stripped the theatrical performance style down to a smaller, more subtle mode suited to the microscope of a film camera. In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), he uses his restless physicality and snappy manner to suggest the roiling desire for bombshell wife (Lana Turner) of his new boss that he tries (and fails) to suppress.
No film did more to popularize Method Acting in Hollywood than A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The original 1947 stage production of Tennessee Williams' play, directed by Actors Studio founder Elia Kazan and cast largely with students of the Method, made a star of leading man Marlon Brando, who was virtually unknown before the play. Kazan brought most of the cast with him to Hollywood (Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy in the role Blanche DuBois) and while Brando had already made his screen debut in The Men (1950), it was Streetcar that made him a movie star. Brando was brutish and bullying, with a mumbling, seemingly spontaneous delivery to Tennessee Williams' richly lyrical dialog, and he radiated a raw sexuality in both attitude and his physical presence. As film critic and Brando biographer Richard Schickel wrote, "just as there had been nothing like this performance on the stage before, there had been nothing like it on the screen either." Ironically, Brando was the only one of the film's four leads not to win an Academy Award. While Leigh and fellow Actors Studio colleagues Karl Malden and Kim Hunter all took home Oscars, Best Actor nominee Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (1951).
While Brando's performance essentially defined the Method for screen audiences, Montgomery Clift beat him to the screen with such films as The Search (1948), The Heiress (1949), and Red River (1948), where the young actor not only held his own against John Wayne but inspired the veteran star to up his game. Where Brando was the epitome of the passionate but inarticulate American male on the 1950s, Clift brought a different kind of intensity to the screen. Slim, lean, with expressive eyes and an androgynous beauty, he could project both strength and vulnerability, most notably as the trumpet-playing soldier in From Here to Eternity (1953). He committed himself entirely to the role, learning to play the bugle and tirelessly mastering military drills, and the heightened naturalism of his performance set him apart from the more familiar styles from his costars. It adds to the feeling that this tormented soldier, bullied for his convictions by a vindictive commander, is an outsider in the unit.
Clift is even more enigmatic as the tortured priest in Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953), where his approach to character clashed with the director's precise method to directing. In one famous story, Hitchcock struggled to get Clift to look off camera to match a reverse shot in sequence that the filmmaker had meticulously planned out. The actor refused until he understood the character's motivation for the action. As Hitchcock recalled later, "working with Montgomery Clift was difficult because he was a method actor and a neurotic as well."
Brando and Clift set a new bar for screen acting and inspired young actors like John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier, the stars of Edge of the City (1957). Directed by Group Theatre veteran Martin Ritt, the drama of race and racism on the New York docks gave a showcase to these actors who developed their own Method Acting approach outside of the Actors Studio.
The second night of the series opens in the 1960s with Splendor in the Grass (1961) and a new generation of Method Actors. Warren Beatty was seen by many as another pretty boy riding his good looks to success but he studied under Stella Adler and modeled himself on Brando and James Dean. He campaigned for the lead role in Splendor to work with director Elia Kazan. For Beatty, it was a graduate school in Method Acting for film, and it launched him as a bona fide movie star.
Actress Barbara Loden, a member of Kazan's theater company and a lifetime member of The Actor's Studio, played Beatty's sister in the film. Though not as famous of many of her contemporaries, she won a Tony Award in 1964 for "After the Fall" and went on to write, direct and star in Wanda (1970), a landmark American independent film. Neglected for decades until it was restored and revived in 2010, Loden's provocative drama of a directionless woman who passively drifts into a relationship with a petty criminal was an anti-Bonnie and Clyde (1967). There's no glamor to this crime spree and nothing sexy about this outlaw couple. "It was sort of based on my own personality...A sort of passive, wandering around, passing from one person to another, no direction," Loden explained in 1971. "I spent many years of my life that way…" Upon the film's revival, The New Yorker critic Richard Brody described Loden as "the female John Cassavetes."
Jack Nicholson had worked in almost every aspect of filmmaking—in addition to acting, he worked on film crews, wrote screenplays, produced and directed—before coming into his own as a star in the 1970s, but his formative lessons came from Jeff Corey, one of the most revered acting teachers and coaches of his day. "Corey taught good actors were meant to absorb life," Nicholson explained in a 1985 interview, and he had plenty of absorbed life to draw from when finally broke out as a leading man in Five Easy Pieces (1970) for director Bob Rafelson. The story of an oil rigger who travels home to the family of musicians he fled became a seminal film, ushering in the seventies with a new kind of filmmaking and an anti-hero like no one we've seen before. It also launched Nicholson as a new breed of Hollywood star. The most notorious scene in the film involves a chicken salad sandwich but the defining moment—a one-way conversation with a father stricken mute by a stroke—pushed Nicholson to dig deeper than he'd ever gone before. ''On take one, away I went," the actor recalled years later. "It was a breakthrough for me as an actor, for actors. I don't think they'd had this level of emotion, really, in almost any male character until that point.''
Martin Scorsese directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) but Actors Studio graduate Ellen Burstyn was the driving force behind the film. "My mission was to make a film from a woman’s point of view, and a certain level of reality in the acting was what I knew I wanted," she explained in a 2019 interview. She had a script and a studio behind her but needed a director. "I saw Mean Streets (1973) and said, 'That’s it. That’s Studio.' Meaning, that’s Actors Studio. That level of being real." Elements of her relationship with her own son found its way into the script as Scorsese improvised scenes with the actors, many of whom had trained at the Actors Studio, in a long rehearsal process. It was real partnership between collaborators and the performance earned Burstyn the Academy Award for Best Actress in a leading role. "Marty has a way of providing a creative atmosphere on the set wherein the actors can do what they know how to do best."
You could call Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) a master class in Method Acting from two of its most celebrated adherents. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep play a married couple battling for custody of their young son during a brutal divorce, and their portrayals shaped the film in profound ways. Hoffman, who was going through a divorce as production began, brought his own experience to the role. Streep came to the film with a handful of screen credits to her name, all in supporting roles, but she fought to bring more dimension to a character she believed was unfairly unsympathetic. The two actors clashed on the set, with Hoffman hurling insults and obscenities at the actress, and in one take physically slapping her without warning, ostensibly to draw raw emotion from Streep (the take featuring the slap made it into the film). Both actors won Academy Awards for their passionate performances, but decades later Hoffman's behavior remains controversial. It blurs the line between devotion to the Method and bullying, and it betrays the ideal of the collaborative aspect of acting. One wonders if Hoffman would have been so brazen with an actress with more screen experience or professional clout.
