Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [10]
A young actress he was seeing on and off who lived in the same building suggested he try acting. She said he should come and sit in on one of her classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a downtown school for actors and actresses run by Sanford Meisner. As he remembered it, she looked at him and said, “Say, why don’t you come down to the Neighborhood Playhouse with me? They’re having auditions, and you look like you might have some talent stashed away in you.”
Why not? So he went to a class and was knocked out again, this time not by a fist or by the quality of the acting, which at this point he had no way of judging and didn’t really care that much about, but by all the gorgeous young girls eager to learn how to emote. Acting might just be a good field for him after all. He did some fast checking and discovered that if he were accepted, he could attend for free under the G.I. Bill.
After sitting in on a few classes, he decided to call Sanford Meisner and find out how to get into the Neighborhood Playhouse. He and Meisner talked for a while, and Meisner asked Steven to come by for a personal interview. After a few minutes face-to-face, Meisner told Steven he was in. “That’s when I became a man instead of a boy,” McQueen later remembered. “Until he got after me, I understood nothing.”
Although he didn’t know it at the time, Steven had been accepted into a highly competitive group of seventy-two students, handpicked from more than three thousand applications. This was the beginning of what would become a phenomenon of style that would eventually alter the nature of the American stage, television, and film industries. It was the reblossoming of the Method, and as far as Meisner was concerned, Steven was a natural at it.
Method acting had been virtually unknown in commercial America until the 1930s, when the New York–based Group Theater introduced techniques that had been popularized in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavsky. His innovations in stage performing included such techniques as sense memory, improvisational character development, and moment-to-moment reality, all intended to bring a heightened—or as Stanislavsky called it, “theatrical” truth—to actors’ performances.
The Method quickly caught on in America, until the jaws of politics gnawed away at the core membership for its leftist leanings (not at all uncommon among American artists in the thirties). The scent of communism proved irresistible to those American agents hunting so-called traitors, infiltrators, and spies for the Soviet Union in mainstream films, radio, and theater during the Depression. Those of the Group’s founders who could no longer find work as actors and/or directors, which was most, turned to teaching as a way of making a living. Among them were Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, and Sanford Meisner. Each eventually developed something of a cult following, blurring the lines between teacher and guru. Their approaches may have varied, but all were teaching, essentially, a method of acting derived from Stanislavsky.4
In 1947, Marlon Brando, eventually the ultimate American exemplar of the Method, made his breakthrough in Tennessee Williams’s powerful, timely, and psychologically radical Broadway play A Streetcar Named Desire. Both the theatrical and later the 1951 screen version, which also starred Brando, were directed by Elia Kazan, who had begun his career as a stage manager and actor for the original Group Theater. Both times, Kazan’s direction of Brando emphasized his beauty, strength, and animal sexuality so powerfully and successfully that Brando’s appearance, speech, posture, and attitude became the obligatory accoutrements of Method acting, American style.
While Steven was on the make for pretty actresses, Meisner was in search of the Method’s next Brando, and he thought he had finally found him in his young blond protégé. During an exercise Steven did one day in improvisation class with his assigned partner, Ellen Clark (later Hayers), she unexpectedly slapped him across the face, and he reacted in perfect Method fashion