32 Facts About Lee Strasberg

1.

Lee Strasberg co-founded, with theatre directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective".

2.

Lee Strasberg's father emigrated to New York while his family remained in their home village with an uncle, a rabbinical teacher.

3.

Young Lee Strasberg took refuge in voracious reading and the companionship of his older brother, Zalmon, whose death in the 1918 influenza pandemic was so traumatic for the young Lee Strasberg that, despite being a straight-A student, he dropped out of high school.

4.

Lee Strasberg later joined the Chrystie Street Settlement House's drama club.

5.

Philip Loeb, casting director of the Theater Guild, sensed that Lee Strasberg could act, although he was not yet thinking of a full-time acting career and was still working as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper for a wig company.

6.

Lee Strasberg became a naturalized United States citizen on January 16,1939, in New York City at the New York Southern District Court.

7.

Lee Strasberg had seen good acting before, of course, but never an ensemble like this with actors completely surrendering their egos to the work.

8.

In 1925, Lee Strasberg had his first professional appearance in Processional, a play produced by the Theater Guild.

9.

Lee Strasberg gained a reputation with the Theater Guild of New York and helped form the Group Theater in New York in 1931.

10.

Lee Strasberg's teaching style owed much to the Russian practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavski, whose book, An Actor Prepares, dealt with the psychology of acting.

11.

Lee Strasberg began by directing, but his time was gradually taken up by the training of actors.

12.

Lee Strasberg is one of the few artists among American theater directors.

13.

Lee Strasberg is the director of introverted feeling, of strong emotion curbed by ascetic control, sentiment of great intensity muted by delicacy, pride, fear, shame.

14.

Amid internecine tensions, Lee Strasberg resigned as director of the Group Theatre in March 1937.

15.

Lee Strasberg assumed leadership of the studio in 1951 as its artistic director.

16.

The founders, including Lee Strasberg, demanded total commitment and extreme talent from aspiring students.

17.

Lee Strasberg would have claimed credit for the sun and the moon if he believed he could get away with it.

18.

Lee Strasberg tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru.

19.

Lee Strasberg carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.

20.

Lee Strasberg was the center of the camp's activities that summer, the core of the vortex.

21.

Lee Strasberg was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, made them 'permanent.

22.

Lee Strasberg knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his mission and its importance.

23.

At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee Strasberg laid down the rules, supervised the first exercises.

24.

Lee Strasberg was looking forward to participating in the many exciting things.

25.

Lee Strasberg was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

26.

Late in the evening, I wandered into the greenroom and saw Lee Strasberg sitting next to Anna, watching the taping on the monitor.

27.

Lee Strasberg's coffin was brought down the aisle and placed center stage.

28.

Lee Strasberg was a giant of the theater and was deeply mourned.

29.

Lee Strasberg will be missed, but he leaves behind a great legacy.

30.

Lee Strasberg recreates romance as a drama of male neuroticism and invests his characterization 'with an unprecedented aura of verisimilitude.

31.

In 2012, Lee Strasberg's family donated his library of personal papers to the Library of Congress.

32.

Lee Strasberg is a character in Names, Mark Kemble's play about former Group Theatre members' struggles during the blacklist era.