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the author’s intention. It resulted in the audience feeling totally left out of and uninterested in his masturbatory performance.
    Both Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan, on a number of separate occasions, told me they felt Lee to be a complete charlatan and a self-serving martinet. And the really great teacher of the twentieth century, Stella Adler, said to me:
    â€œLee is not a man of the theatre. It will take one hundred years to undo the harm he has done to the acting community.”
    And Marlon Brando, perhaps the greatest film actor of the twentieth century; at his best a brilliant combination of truth and technique until he dissolved into a self-indulgent, lazy bore, found Strasberg to be, as Stella repeated it to me, “An asshole and a fake who taught me nothing.”
    Oddly enough Marilyn Monroe, whom Strasberg had under his spell, seemed to profit from his misguided teachings. In the film The Misfits , she is transcendently and heartbreakingly honest. Strasberg certainly profited from her as well. In Marilyn’s will he was left her entire estate.
    There was a great deal of hoopla around his acting in a film with Pacino, one of his renowned students, in which his sense of “truth” was offended when he was given a pair of brown socks instead of the black ones more appropriate to his costume. His performance was ordinary and without distinction, but nevertheless Oscar nominated. As comfortable as he may have been in his black socks, he lacked the magic and mystery that makes a star actor, and his most famous students all had that and would have succeeded, I believe, without him.
    I am prepared to admit that my antipathy toward Mr. Strasberg had a great deal to do with his grandiosity and his misguided self-importance. And certainly, I have seen some remarkable performances from one or two of his students. But my sense was always that his outsized ego and kingly behavior stemmed more from his diminutive stature than his desire to protect and nurture his students. A teacher, I believe, should guide, not rule. Too many actors told me how afraid of him they were. The very opposite, I would think, of the emotion a teacher should inspire in a student.
    In 1964 he directed a stupefying production of Chekov’s The Three Sisters . At twenty-six years old I sat mesmerized by only one person. It was the great actress of her generation, Kim Stanley, who gave a transcendent performance combining all the ingredients necessary for great acting: truth, honesty, skill, and craft. Mr. Strasberg’s methods helped his students find, perhaps, their inner truth, but resulted in a limited and narrow perspective, creating actors totally unprepared for the classics and the challenges that come with the technique required to perform them. The Method is, for me, a dangerous movement put forth by a self-serving charlatan, who totally misreprensented the brilliant technique of Stanislavski.
    Whenever in the same room with Strasberg, I avoided his sycophantic circle. The last time I was in his presence he sucked the air out of the elevator we were riding in and when we hit the ground floor he put out his hand in a “stand back, I’m departing” gesture that caused me to laugh out loud. He stopped, looked up at me with pure hatred and exited in a low-hanging cloud of fury. It remains one of my fondest sense memories.

CELIA JOHNSON
    I t was her eyes that first struck me. Huge and saucer-like.
    A renowned television personality named David Susskind was producing a series of dramatic stories and had cast me in one of them. It was called The Choice . My costars were Jill Clayburgh, Melvyn Douglas, and Celia Johnson, whose fame in America had come from a classic film she’d done for Noel Coward in 1945 entitled Brief Encounter.
    Melvyn Douglas had appeared opposite Greta Garbo in Ninotchka and was considered now a venerable and charming character actor— a quiet, polite man with a constant twinkle in his