Actors - Robert Lewis

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	Actors - Robert Lewis

Robert Lewis (born 16 March, 1909 - died 23 November, 1997) was an American actor, director, drama teacher, author and founder of the influential Actors Studio in New York in 1947.

In addition to his accomplishments on Broadway and in Hollywood, Lewis' greatest and longest lasting contribution to American theater may be the role he played as one of the foremost acting and directing teachers of his day. He was an early proponent of the Stanislavski System of acting technique and a founding member of New York's revolutionary Group Theatre in the 1930s. In the 1970s, he was the Head of the Yale School of Drama Acting and Directing Departments.

Early Years

Bobby Lewis was born in Brooklyn in 1909 to a middle class working family. Encouraged in the arts by his mother, a former contralto, Lewis acquired an early and lifelong interest in music, particularly opera. He studied cello and piano as a child but these eventually gave way to his love of acting and, in 1929, he joined Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. His musical background did, however, prove invaluable later, when he bacame a director of Broadway musicals, operas and filmmed musicals in Hollywood.

The Group Theatre

In 1931, Lewis became one of the 28 original (and youngest) members of New York's revolutionary Group Theatre. Formed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and producer Cheryl Crawford, The Group was an ensemble of passionate young actors, directors and writers who came together to explore the inner processes of theatre craft.

Lewis and other members of The Group, such as Stella Adler and Elia Kazan, were believers in a new form of American acting based on the techniques of Russian director, Constantin Stanislavski. The Stanislavski System, they believed, resulted in a more truthful, more believable, and therefore more powerful stage performance than could be accomplished with more traditional stylistic techniques common at that time.

Differences in translation and emphasis between the Russian Stanislavski System and what eventually came to be known as the Strasberg Method were debated vigorously in The Group. In later years, Lewis felt that Strasberg's Method, while valid in its particulars, was a misrepresentation of Stanislavski because it emphasized only some parts of Stanislavski's theory. (See Method — or Madness?, below)

Lewis appeared in several original Group Theatre productions in the 1930s including Sidney Kingsley's Pulitzer Prize winning Men in White, and Clifford Odets' plays Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Paradise Lost and Golden Boy.

Despite the Group's success, fractious disagreements, the lure of Hollywood and financial issues began to take a toll and, by late 1936, production was suspended. Officially released from Group obligations, many of the members, including Lewis and Group founder Harold Clurman, went off to join other Group members already in Hollywood. In April of 1937, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford resigned as directors.

Robert Lewis returned to New York a year later to restart a Group workshop with Elia Kazan, which they called the Group Theatre Studio. Starting with fifty actors chosen from four hundred who auditioned, Lewis and Kazan became the principle teachers. That same year, Harold Clurman returned from Hollywood to stage a production of Golden Boy, which became the Group's most successful play. Robert Lewis was cast as Roxy Gottlieb, the prizefight promoter. Lewis later maintained that he had been miscast in the original production, though he assumed a more satisfying role as director of his own successful production of Golden Boy at the St. James Theatre in London, in 1938.

While in London, Lewis studied with Michael Chekov, an actor whose work he admired and whom Stanislavski considered one of the foremost interpreters of his theories. At Chekov's studio in Devonshire at Dartington Hall, Lewis further shaped his understanding of the Stanislavski "Method," as it was becoming known in America.

The following year, Lewis made his Broadway directorial debut with a critically successful production of William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands (1939).

Hollywood

As did other Group members like Franchot Tone, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, Lewis found the "need to sin" in Hollywood (as Odets called it) irresistible.

In his book Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life, Lewis complains that "being short and round," he reluctantly had to accept that, as an actor, he fell into the character, rather than the leading man category.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Robert Lewis ]

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