Lee Strasberg is an extremely controversial figure. Perhaps not to the outside world, but to acting afficianados he can be polarizing. People love him or scorn him. People revere his memory or discount it. He was feared rather than liked. He could be imperious. But there are those actors (Al Pacino, Ellen Burstyn) who feel he allowed them to be where they are today.
I studied with his son, Johnny Strasberg, who looks exactly like his father.
In the following excerpt from Elia Kazan: A Life
In the next few days, I was to discover that this unyielding remoteness was habitual with Lee. 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.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was sneak-bombed by the Japaneses, Admiral Ernest King was quoted: ‘Well, they’ve got themselves into a war. Now they need a son of a bitch to fight it.’ He was speaking of his government and meant himself. Sometimes only a tough, unyielding man can do a job that’s for the good of all. Admiral King was necessary after Pearl Harbor, and Lee Strasberg was necessary that summer in 1932. He enjoyed his eminence just as the admiral world. Actors are as self-favoring as the rest of humanity, and perhaps they only way they could be held together to do their work propoerly was by the threat of an authority they respected. And feared.
Clearly Lee thought so. He had a gift for anger and a taste for the power it brought him. 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.
