Acting with Adler by Joanna Rotté

Joanna Rotté, a writer, actor and director, studied with Stella Adler for three years in the 1970's. A member of Actors Equity, she has a doctorate in theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a professor of graduate-level theatre at Villanova University in addition to teaching at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York City.

Ellen Adler, Stella's daughter from her first marriage to Horace Eliascheff, has contributed an unusual foreward that eschews tracing her mother's life or career. Ms. Adler devotes a few sentences to her mother and her three husband and devotes the bulk of the foreward to describing the Adler family burial plot in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, N.Y. This is the final resting place of two major stars of the late 19th/early 20th century Yiddish theatre, Jacob and Sara Adler (Ellen's grandparents), their sons Jay, Abe, and Luther (he of the piercing stare) and daughters Frances (with her daughters, Pearl and Lulla) and Stella (along with her second husband, Harold Clurman. )


Acting with Adler is of interest to the casual reader for its insight into one method of teaching acting (sometimes referred to as "The Method"). Readers with an interest in the life and career of Stella Adler can glean some nuggets of information but this distillation of Miss Adler's ideas only makes me wish someone would write a proper biography. In the meantime Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years is the best substitute that I've found.