The American Academy of Dramatic Arts

Abstract

Chapter 7 clarifies the vision of Modern acting formulated by Academy director Charles Jehlinger, who led the school from 1900 to his death in 1952. Known in the 1930s and 1940s as the acting school that launched Spencer Tracy, Lauren Bacall, and other stars, its graduates today include John Cassavetes, Robert Redford, and Jessica Chastain. To illustrate the Modern acting strategies circulated at the Academy, the chapter examines notes from Jehlinger’s classes, material in an acting manual by Academy instructor Aristide D’Angelo, and reports by Academy graduates, who compare Jehlinger’s to Stanislavsky’s approach for many reasons, including both teachers’ emphasis on preparation that allows actors to set aside convention and personal experiences in order to do what the character would do in a specific situation.

The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which began as the Lyceum School founded in 1884 by theatrical innovator Steele MacKaye and elocution professor Franklin Sargent, arose alongside the wave of activity that led to the creation of landmark institutions such as the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (1861), the Moscow Art Theatre (1898), and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (1904). Sargent would lead the Academy from 1885 until his death in 1923, after which Charles Jehlinger, who had graduated from the Academy in 1886 and returned as an instructor in 1898, took over and served as its director until his death in 1952. The Academy was first housed in New York’s Lyceum Theatre; in 1896, the institution moved to Carnegie Hall, and in 1963 relocated to its current home on Madison Avenue; the Academy established a West Coast branch in 1974, now on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles.

It is not surprising that the Academy was known as “the cradle to the stars” in the 1930s and 1940s; it provided training for Spencer Tracy, Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, Grace Kelly, and Lauren Bacall, who remain on the American Film Institute’s register of “50 Greatest American Screen Legends.”¹ After the studio era, the Academy has figured into the careers of various prominent actors. Noting the year they completed their study, Academy actors include: Anne Bancroft (1950), John Cassavetes (1950), Gena Rowlands (1952), Robert Redford (1959), M. Emmet Walsh (1961), Dennis Haysbert (1977), Carrie-Anne Moss (1988), Paul Rudd (1991), Anne Hathaway (1993), Jessica Chastain (1998), and Luke Grimes (2004).²

From the Academy to Broadway and then Hollywood

In the 1910s, the Academy provided an artistic home for a number of actors who would go on to have significant careers in theatre and/or film. Clare Eames (1918) quickly became one of the leading actors in 1920s American theatre, but her brilliant career was cut short when she died in 1930 at the age of thirty-six. Other graduates such as William Powell (1913), Edward G. Robinson (1913), Joseph Schildkraut (1913), Ruth Gordon (1914) and Frank Morgan (1914) enjoyed careers of remarkable longevity. Robinson was one of the first actors to move from the Academy to Broadway to Hollywood. He made his stage debut in 1913, and after serving in World War I was often in productions staged by Arthur Hopkins or the Theatre Guild (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

A 1927 Theatre Guild production of The Brothers Karamazov. (left to right) George Gaul, Alfred Lunt, Morris Carnovsky, and Edward G. Robinson

Robinson appeared on Broadway from 1915 to 1930 in a commendable series of performances that included “the role of The Director in Sven Lange’s Samson and Delilah, which brought the great Yiddish Art Theatre actor, Jacob Ben-Ami, to Broadway for the first time.”³ Robinson’s first starring role as the gangster in The Racket (1927), a melodrama by Bartlett Cormack, demonstrated his ability to transform the sensational material into modern drama. Noting the critical acclaim Robinson received for The Racket, which had a commercially successful 119‑performance run, biographer James Parish calls attention to the play’s review in Theatre Magazine, which described his performance as “a masterly creation of character.”⁴ The subsequent commercial and critical success of Robinson’s starring role in the gangster movie Little Caesar led him to work exclusively in Hollywood until the mid-1950s, when he was gray-listed for being a New Deal liberal. Robinson’s varied career would include work in film from 1916 to 1973 and on television from 1955 to 1971; he received a Tony nomination for his leading role in Middle of the Night (1956) and a posthumous Honorary Oscar.

Reflecting his training at the Academy, Robinson’s interviews highlight the crucial importance of careful script analysis. He explains: “It is impossible to portray the reactions of a character you are creating in the movies or on the stage unless you are thoroughly familiar with his mental and emotional reflexes, and have determined in your own mind what his reactions will be to any given circumstance.”⁵ Discussing his preparation for playing the fight promoter in Kid Galahad (Curtiz 1937), Robinson explains:

I reconstructed his life … from the cradle to that big moment in his boxer’s dressing room at Madison Square Garden. I knew all his doubts and complexes, his strength and his weaknesses, his passions and his powers. I knew he was a fellow of terrible, quick temper, kept in control only by the self-discipline which enabled him to rise to the top of his own peculiar profession.⁶

While Robinson had a substantial Broadway career before moving to Hollywood, his fellow Academy graduate William Powell, who became known for starring with Myrna Loy in the Thin Man films (1934–1947), first “went through the subsequent familiar periods of stage, vaudeville, joblessness, touring companies … before finally being ‘discovered’ with the help of a good Broadway role” in 1922.⁷ Despite the initial commercial challenges in his career, Powell emphasizes the value of the training he gained at the Academy:

I have never gone into a picture without first studying my characterization from all angles. I make a study of the fellow’s life and try to learn everything about him, including the conditions under which he came into this world, his parentage, his environment, his social status, and the things in which he is interested. Then I attempt to get his mental attitude as much as possible.⁸

A number of actors who studied at the Academy in the 1920s would have careers on Broadway and later Hollywood. They include: Thelma Ritter (1922), Spencer Tracy (1923), Pat O’Brien (1923), Sam Levene (1927), Rosalind Russell (1929), Claire Trevor (1929), and Agnes Moorehead (1929). Tracy quickly found work on Broadway, and his performance as Killer Mears in The Last Mile (1930) led director John Ford to cast him in the film Up the River (1930). Sam Levene, known for his Broadway comedies and noir films of the 1940s, would have a career that paralleled Robinson, Powell, and Tracy, for he also went from Broadway and then to Hollywood. In Levene’s case, his role in the Broadway comedy Three Men on a Horse (1935–1937) led to his leading role in the 1936 film directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Levene’s career would include work on Broadway from 1927 to 1980, in film from 1936 to 1979, and on television from 1949 to 1977.

The career path of Academy graduate Thelma Ritter was rather different. After work in stock, radio, and on Broadway, she took time from acting to raise her children, then moved into film after her longtime friend, Hollywood drama coach Phyllis Loughton, suggested Ritter for a part in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) directed by Loughton’s husband, George Seaton. Ritter’s casting scenario points to the professional network that Academy graduates entered; it also reveals the more circuitous careers of women, especially those who did not fit the ingénue image—for example, Agnes Moorehead, best known as Endora in the TV show Bewitched (1964–1972), had worked in radio, earned a Master’s degree in English and public speaking at the University of Wisconsin, and taught English and drama at a public school in Wisconsin for five years before entering the Academy. After graduating from Jehlinger’s program, she continued to work in radio; her multi-venue experience prompted Orson Welles to ask her to join the Mercury Players in 1939; she went to Hollywood as a member of the cast of Citizen Kane (Welles 1941).

Rosalind Russell also graduated from the Academy in 1929, but she followed a career path that approximated that of her male colleagues. After leaving the Academy, Russell found work in stock companies and in minor parts in Broadway shows before being cast in a supporting role in Evelyn Prentice (Howard 1934), a Hollywood film starring Academy graduate William Powell. The following year, Russell appeared in several films, including Rendezvous (Howard 1935), in which she had a leading role opposite Powell. Russell eventually became known for co-starring with Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (Hawks 1940) and for her flamboyant leading role in the Broadway production of Auntie Mame (1956–1958) and the 1958 Hollywood adaptation directed by Morton DaCosta.

In the 1930s, the Academy provided the starting point for the careers of TV star Robert Cummings (1932), and film actors Hume Cronyn (1934), Betty Fields (1934), and Jennifer Jones (1939). Cummings would become known for his role as host of the Bob Cummings Show (1955–1959). Hume Cronyn, recognized by some audiences for his senior-citizen roles in Cocoon (Howard 1985) and Cocoon: The Return (Petrie 1988), secured his first Broadway role in 1934. His career on Broadway continued until 1986; he and his wife Jessica Tandy were honored by a 1994 Lifetime Achievement Tony award. Cronyn gained notice for his role in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and he was in films until 1996 and on television until 2004.

In the 1940s, the Academy was a starting point in the careers of Kirk Douglas (1941), Lauren Bacall (1942), Jason Robards, Jr. (1947), Colleen Dewhurst (1947), and Grace Kelly (1949). Telescoping developments in the 1940s by looking at the career of Kirk Douglas, one might note that after minor roles in stock and on Broadway, he enlisted in the navy in 1941 and served until he received a medical discharge in 1944. He returned to minor roles on Broadway, and was cast in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Milestone 1946) after Bacall encouraged Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis to meet with Douglas during a talent scouting trip to New York. Robards would go on to receive a Tony award in 1959 and Oscars in 1976 and 1977; Colleen Dewhurst’s work was acknowledged by a 1961 Tony award. The Academy offered a starting point for many actors who went on to have visible careers in theatre, film, and television (Fig. 7.2).⁹

Fig. 7.2

Kirk Douglas in a student production at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After graduating in 1941, Douglas secured a few small parts with Katharine Cornell’s theatre company

Training in Modern Acting at the Academy

Delsarte’s work had provided the initial basis for instruction at the Academy. Yet once Jehlinger returned as an instructor in 1898, “the basic teaching concept of the school [moved] from mechanical Delsartean diagrams to subjective naturalism,” and its approach was later seen as “strikingly similar to Stanislavski’s.”¹⁰ Discussing the shift at the Academy, theatre critic John Allen observes:

Just what happened to Charles Jehlinger between the time in 1884 when he [began as a student at the Academy] and when he joined the faculty of the school is not clear. What is clear is the fact that when he did begin to teach he reversed completely the Delsartian approach and developed an ‘inner’ system which anticipated the theories of Stanislavsky in America by many years.¹¹

Parallels between early work at the Academy and the Moscow Art Theatre are not surprising; as discussed in Chap. 5, there are connections between Stanislavsky’s ideas and those of Charles Emerson and Samuel Curry, who led two of the other acting programs established in the USA in the 1880s. In addition, as the Academy’s list of recommended reading (to be discussed in a moment) suggests, ideas about acting were being circulated in books by actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and critics starting in the 1880s and continuing through the 1920s.

Even early on, Academy faculty ensured that students were exposed to the ideas of leading acting teachers. In the commencement speech for the 1915 graduating class, acclaimed British writer-director Harley Granville-Barker outlined some insights he had gained during a recent trip to the Moscow Art Theatre. Describing one, he explained that from Stanislavsky’s perspective:

to study a play, and to study a part, and not merely learn it mechanically you should do this: You should first study the character; then when you come to the actual staging of the thing and you want to learn to work in with the other people you should set up in your mind certain milestones [for] that character and that part … he said if you will do that … you will find that your performance is really spontaneous.¹²

The verbatim notes that Eleanor Cody Gould transcribed in 1918 during her first year as a student at the Academy reveal common ground between Stanislavsky’s and Jehlinger’s early views about acting. Echoing Stanislavsky’s interest in actors “who understand the problems that face men and women in the world,” Jehlinger told the students in his rehearsal class: “There is no limit to the art of acting. You need the understanding of all human nature, the sense of beauty of an artist and poet, the rhythm of the dancer and musician, and mentality of a philosopher and scientist.”¹³ Taking a position shared by Stanislavsky about an actor’s relationship to a character, Jehlinger explained that the “secret of the whole thing is this: Yield to the character and let it take control of affairs”—and remember that the “emotion will handle itself if you just give in.”¹⁴ He insisted that students “develop a sensitive response to the character” and never “fail to make the transition from self to character.”¹⁵ Articulating ideas central to Stanislavsky and the teachers who circulated Modern acting principles in the 1930s and 1940s, Jehlinger told students in the 1918 rehearsal class: “Stop and ask yourself. ‘What would happen here in real life? I would do a thing this way – but how am I different from the character I am portraying? So – how would the character react to this?’”¹⁶

Gould’s notes from her 1919 rehearsal class with Jehlinger reveal that the value he placed on script analysis anticipates the view of subsequent Modern acting teachers. Noting that the “minute you go contrary to the author’s instructions, you defeat yourself,” Jehlinger told his students: “Your manuscript is a gold mine of information. Dig into it.”¹⁷ He saw careful script analysis as the work that enabled an actor to establish key factors, such as the age of the character, “his nationality, profession, social standing, temperament; his physical, emotional and mental qualities.”¹⁸ In Jehlinger’s view, commitment to the character as written is what allowed actors to avoid imitation and thus finally create characters with “individuality.”¹⁹

With Jehlinger’s permission, Gould returned to the Academy starting in 1934 to transcribe additional material from his rehearsal classes. Her notes from 1950 reveal that Jehlinger maintained his emphasis on script analysis as the basis for characterization. As he told these students: unless you study your text, “you cannot act. Preliminary study is seeking to learn the facts about your character. You have to go to the author to get these … Creating a character is like building a house. You have to accumulate the material with which to build it.”²⁰ He also found ways to describe the pragmatic reasons for making individual preparation leading to full embodiment of character a priority. Noting that the “minute you are a character you are at ease as an actor,” Jehlinger explained: “Nature abhors a vacuum. If the character is not there, thoughts of stage business and cues rush in.”²¹

Jehlinger’s modern vision of acting shaped the Academy’s training program, which had forty‑four graduates in 1931 and seventy in 1938.²² The school offered a two-year program; it screened students entering the first year and required actors to audition for the second year of training. In students’ initial year, they took classes in voice, movement, and makeup. In some exercises designed to enhance relaxation, they explored breathing techniques. Students also took fencing classes to improve their timing, balance, and body control. This work was designed to increase their physical dexterity, ability to express ideas in action, and capacity to embody a range of characters in their many states of mind. If students were accepted into the second-year program, they performed a different three-act play each week.²³

In the 1930s and 1940s, students’ first encounter with Jehlinger would occur when they presented their audition-examination plays at the end of their year. Courses in improvisation and other subjects were taught by a faculty that included Edward Goodman, Arthur Hughes, Philip Loeb, and Aristide D’Angelo.²⁴ Goodman was a co-founder of the Washington Square Players (1914–1918), which became the Theatre Guild; his career included work as a director for the Federal Theatre Project (1935–1939), and he wrote plays, short stories, and Make Believe: The Art of Acting (1956). Arthur Hughes, an actor on Broadway from 1923 to 1968, was a member of The Stagers, a theatre company that mounted productions between 1925 and 1927, many of them directed by Edward Goodman. Philip Loeb appeared in Theatre Guild productions, and in 1948 co-starred with Gertrude Berg in Molly and Me; the play, based on Berg’s radio program, led to the early CBS television show The Goldbergs (1949–1957) starring Berg and Loeb, who was forced to resign in 1950 after his name appeared in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Loeb, cast in only two shows during the next five years, committed suicide in 1955. D’Angelo, who graduated from Cornell University in 1923, was acquainted with Group Theatre members (his first wife, Evelyn, offered tutoring in voice and speech during the Group’s summer retreat in 1933); throughout D’Angelo’s teaching career, which lasted into the 1950s, he would highlight imagination as the key to performance, for he found personal substitutions to be something that “slowed down rather than freed” actors’ efforts to embody living characters.²⁵

D’Angelo’s The Actor Creates sheds light on the approach to acting shared with Academy students in the 1930s and 1940s, and is seen by Academy graduates as “a reliable and valid picture of Jehlinger’s ideas.”²⁶ The Actor Creates might be an allusion to translator Elizabeth Hapgood’s title for the book known to Americans as Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares; D’Angelo’s title certainly conveys his central premise—namely, that “acting is a creative art”—for while he argues that an actor’s ideas about a character “must have their roots firmly imbedded in the play,” he sees acting as “that process whereby the actor conceives the character and reveals him before the audience. Conception and revelation—the whole art can be summed up in those two words.”²⁷

D’Angelo’s bibliography/reading recommendations point to the body of knowledge Academy teachers shared with students in the 1930s and 1940s. The list of twenty-five volumes begins with Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry and several other books that were first published prior to 1900: William Archer’s Masks or Faces?; Constant Coquelin’s The Actor and His Art; Denis Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting; Henry Irving’s The Drama; George Henry Lewes’ On Actors and the Art of Acting; and François Joseph Talma’s Reflexions (sic) on the Actor’s Art. D’Angelo’s list includes: Brander Matthew’s On Acting (1914), William Gillette’s The Illusion of the First Time in Acting (1915); Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of a Author (1921); Joseph Jefferson’s autobiography (1923); The Art of Acting (1926), a volume with excerpts of writing by Constant Coquelin, Henry Irving, and Dion Boucicault; John Dolman’s The Art of Play Production (1928); and George Bernard Shaw’s The Art of Rehearsal (1928). The other books on D’Angelo’s list are mentioned or discussed at length in my study, and they are: Edward Gordon Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre (1911); Stanislavsky’s My Life in Art (1924) and An Actor Prepares (1936); A. M. Drummond’s A Manual of Play Production (1932); Eva Alberti’s A Handbook of Acting Based on the New Pantomime (1933); Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933); Modern Acting: A Manual (1936) by Sophie Rosenstein, Larrae A. Haydon, and Wilbur Sparrow; Our Theatre Today (1936), edited by Herschel L. Bricker; Players at Work: Acting According to the Actors (1937), edited by Eustis Morton; and two books used at the Pasadena Playhouse: Problems of the Actor (1938) by Louis Calvert and General Principles of Play Direction (1936) by Gilmor Brown and Alice Garwood.

The structure of The Actor Creates communicates its focus on acting as the creation and revelation of character: it opens with a substantial section on building characters through script analysis, private improvisation, and various stages of rehearsal; its second section addresses key questions about voice, movement, relaxation, concentration, and feeling; and it concludes with a summary that retraces the process of creating characters and performances. Similarly, D’Angelo notes that an actor must “make his body strong and healthy, his voice clear and resonant, and his speech incisive and articulate,” but he often revisits the idea that voice and speech “must serve the character and not the actor.”²⁸ Script analysis should include improvisation to give “form and significance to the character’s background”—but this and all other preparation must be character-centered, for as D’Angelo explains: “Insofar as the actor identifies himself with the past, present, and imaginative life of the character and is sensitized toward everything that falls within the aura of his concentration on stage, the quality of his voice [and movements] will bear the stamp of truth.”²⁹

In the view of Academy faculty, creating and revealing characters is the focus of an actor’s work, because characters and their conflicting desires are the driving force of modern drama. Noting that a character “is rarely alone,” D’Angelo observes that a character’s contact with other characters, objects, or his memory of experiences … creates desires [and conflict] follows in the fulfillment of desires.”³⁰ Moreover, as D’Angelo explains: “Characters come to life only in relation to one another”—so fully embodied characterization depends on analysis of character relationships and a sensitivity to other performers, not substitutions that trigger actors’ emotion.³¹

Jehlinger and other Academy faculty saw character action and reaction as so fundamental to acting that one Jehlinger axiom appears throughout Academy-related documents. In Gould’s notes from 1951, it is phrased: “Be a slave to your simple law – ‘Continue and increase thought, theme and mood until something happens to change it.’”³² In the introduction to Gould’s notes, Frances Fuller (Academy president and former Jehlinger student) lists the maxim as: “never change thought, theme or mood until something occurs to cause that change.”³³ D’Angelo frames it by saying: when an actor “is fully sensitized in character and toward situation he will continue, never break, thought, theme, and mood until something occurs to make him do so.”³⁴ He explains that thought involves a character’s objectives; theme is reflected by the intention-laden actions a character performs to achieve his/her goals; mood concerns feelings tied to those plans. For instance, one character wants to gain another’s respect, but is anxious about succeeding, so starts by being deferential (arriving early for a meeting); if the other character’s behavior is welcoming, the first character’s mood might become relaxed and the theme/action might take the more direct form of sharing ideas or asking thoughtful questions.

Capturing Jehlinger’s long-standing position, D’Angelo explains that a performance will reflect the ongoing interaction between characters only if “the character is the master and the actor an obedient servant.”³⁵ Thus, rather than encourage actors to make their personal emotion expressive in performance, D’Angelo explains that an “actor’s constant subconscious intrusion of self” is a problem, because it prevents a performer from entering into and staying in character.³⁶ As he points out, actors often “throw their own personal feelings upon the character to a point where the character is never fully or even partially realized,” while others “resort to ‘pumping’ or forcing the feelings.”³⁷ D’Angelo proposes that such performances are no better than ones by actors who “rely upon an external technical pattern of movement and voice as a substitute for true, genuine, artistic expression.”³⁸

To shed light on the “artistic expression” prized by Jehlinger and other Academy faculty, D’Angelo first notes that an actor’s emotion during performance has been theatre practitioners’ “most hotly debated” subject.³⁹ After outlining a concise history of the debates, D’Angelo introduces the Academy position by proposing that a “clear distinction should be made between feeling in life and feeling in the theatre”: artistic feeling “springs from the imagination [while in general] life feeling springs from direct contact with life.”⁴⁰ Marking the distinction, he observes that “the realization of character is a flesh and blood embodiment of an imaginative being [and so] the accompanying feeling must differ from that feeling derived from [one’s] life contact with people and things.”⁴¹ Despite the distinction, artistic feeling is “real,” it is crucial to modern performance, and it happens only “when the actor is in complete, imaginative rapport with the character.”⁴² D’Angelo explains that in a modern, authentic, ensemble performance, artistic feeling is what “stirs the actor to physical and vocal expression”; when “identification of actor and character is complete, he reveals the character through body and voice.”⁴³

Reflections on Jehlinger’s “Method” and Teaching Style

In a 1953 article on the Academy’s contributions to American acting, Theatre Guild co-founder Lawrence Langer argues that “the Jehlinger Method” was largely responsible for the many theatre, film, radio, and television actors able to fill “naturalistic, emotional roles” and play both dramatic and comedic parts.⁴⁴ In a brief outline of “the Jehlinger Method,” Langer notes that it not only included courses in voice, speech, carriage, fencing, and dancing, “more than any teacher [Jehlinger] stressed the exercise of the imagination, and his teaching method, above all, was aimed at spontaneity of action and reaction on the part of the actor.”⁴⁵ To build a role, an actor would recreate “the past life of the character to the extent that this will simplify and clarify, but not complicate, the acting of the role”; to be alive in performance, an actor would listen with such concentration that all speech and action emerged from the thoughts exchanged between the characters.⁴⁶

Bernard Kates, a student at the Academy and an actor who appeared on Broadway from 1949 to 1966 and on television from 1949 to 1999, confirms Langer’s characterization of “the Jehlinger Method,” which Kates describes as “Jehlinger’s viewpoint,” and one “not basically different from Stanislavski’s viewpoint.”⁴⁷ Illustrating the connection, Kates explains: “You never pleased Jehlinger until you were on the track to being the total character. Doing what the character would be doing in a specific situation under specific circumstances and surroundings.”⁴⁸ Explaining that a summary could never capture Jehlinger’s complex “beliefs concerning acting and the artist,” Kates highlights a few ideas by saying that in Jehlinger’s view:

No creation is possible without concentration. No concentration is possible without preparation. You must find out who and what your character is; live with the character’s attitudes to others in the play; with the character’s habits of thinking and living. The great lesson: to eliminate self; to serve the character freely and gladly. Then relax to it. Emotion will play itself … Give the character freedom to be what he is and to do what he wants to do … In creating the character, you must remember that the character always comes from some place, from doing something, to someplace, to do something.⁴⁹

Kates also discusses Jehlinger’s style of teaching, a topic featured in so many student anecdotes that even outsiders knew that Jehlinger was seen not only as “the artistic conscience” of its many graduates but also “the guiding thunder” of the Academy during his half-century of leadership (Fig. 7.3).⁵⁰ Kates sees Jehlinger’s approach as an “antidote against the artificialityof theatre”; he recalls that Jehlinger might “pounce” on any aspect of a student’s performance, but argues that Jehlinger was a “great teacher” because he “inspired his students with the feeling that what they were learning – if faithfully applied – would lead them to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – artistic satisfaction and fulfillment.”⁵¹ In Hume Cronyn’s autobiography, the actor discusses his period of study at the Academy in the 1930s, recalling that Jehly (Jelly)—as students referred to him in conversation but never to his face—was “a sort of mythic figure,” and that trial “by Jehly was traumatic.”⁵² Cronyn remembers that Jehlinger “had an explosive energy and a total intolerance of fakery,” but that he made everyone better actors, because his critiques exposed students’ habit of “demonstrating (ultimate sin), not being.”⁵³ Kirk Douglas, a student at the Academy from 1939 to 1941, points out that Jehlinger “worked in different ways with different students,” and that in his case, Jehlinger put an end to his easy time as a “darling of the [first-year] directors” by halting a second-year performance at Douglas’ initial entrance on stage.⁵⁴ He recalls that after “a scolding from Jelly, you were never unprofessional again,” and that over the course of the second year he came to see that Jehlinger was “working against a certain glibness [he] had, a quick facility, a lack of depth.”⁵⁵ Douglas remembers that Jehlinger would “make you work things out for yourself [and] just as you thought you were going crazy, you finally figured out that what he wanted was truthful behavior.”⁵⁶

Fig. 7.3

Charles Jehlinger: feared and loved by young actors at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts for fifty years

Jehlinger’s threatening tactics represent a departure from the supportive stance used by other Modern acting teachers—and a connection with Strasberg, another man of small stature. Yet Jehlinger’s views on acting and the vision of acting found in The Actor Creates by Academy faculty member Aristide D’Angelo make it clear that the Academy program was grounded in Modern rather than Method acting principles. The successful stage and screen careers of various Academy actors led many of the era’s aspiring students to study at the Academy: Hume Cronyn chose the Academy because Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Robinson, William Powell, and Rosalind Russell were among its graduates.⁵⁷ Kirk Douglas wanted to attend because he had heard that “even the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [in London] had been patterned after it.”⁵⁸ Looking beyond the more visible actors, when one considers the hundreds who studied there during the 1930s and 1940s, it becomes clear that the Academy played a key role in circulating Modern acting principles in the American acting community.