SUSAN STRASBERG
The lovely, luminous phenomenon of the theatre.
By Helen Lawrenson for Esquire, October 1956
Photograph in magazine by Martin Munkacsi
Future historians of the theatre may often have cause to refer to the night of October 5, 1955, when The Diary of Anne Frank opened in New York City and a seventeen-year-old girl walked out behind the footlights of the Cort Theatre to take her place among the great actresses of the American stage.
Show-business experts agree that not since Laurette Taylor in 1910 has any new young actress been received with such critical acclaim as was accorded Susan Strasberg, making her Broadway debut in the title role of Anne. Here was neither the mannered technique of skillfully applied training nor the bright and promising twinkle of talent. It was, instead, the pure star-blaze of the born creative artist, as miraculous as springtime, as a waterfall, as a bird in flight.
Although she has never studied acting, Susan was born into a family to whom the serious theatre is the breath of their nostrils and the marrow of their bones. Her mother is the former Paula Miller, once an actress with the famed Group Theatre. Her father is Lee Strasberg, America’s foremost proponent of “The Method” (the Stanislavsky theory that an actor should live his roles), and director of the Actors’ Studio, the workshop from which came Marlon Brando, James Dean, Julie Harris, Eva Marie Saint, David Wayne, Kim Hunter and an impressive galaxy of other luminaries.
Nevertheless, Susan was not taught by her father—“I’ve been picking things up from him by osmosis,” is her explanation—and only a few years ago she wanted to be a commercial artist. Her sole theatrical experience in school was at P.S. 9, when she took part with other pupils in The Wizard of Oz. She had one line: “The tornado is coming.”
Her first professional appearance was a small role in an off-Broadway revival of Maya. She was fourteen, and she played what she describes as “an up-and-coming young prostitute” in a brothel in the Vieux Port of Marseilles. She got the part because one of her father’s students, who was to have played it, dropped out at the last moment and urged Susan to substitute for her. As a result of this initial effort, she received several television offers, some of which she accepted. Among these was the role of Shakespeare’s Juliet, and a part with Boris Karloff which she took, she explains, “because I felt it might be my only chance ever to play a Chinese girl named Raindrop!”
She then made two pictures in Hollywood: The Cobweb and Picnic. In the latter, released last February, she played an adolescent with such stunning perceptiveness and emotional impact that the New York Times commented: “There should be no doubt now that Miss Strasberg is growing into a towering artist.”
Following the completion of Picnic, she was about to sign a film contract when the chance came to play in the dramatization of the real-life diary of Anne Frank, the thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who went into hiding from the Nazis for two years in an attic in Holland, was finally discovered, and died in the infamous Belsen concentration camp.
After the opening-night show she went with her parents to Sardi’s, gathering place of the theatre, and when she entered the room all of the people in the crowded restaurant rose to their feet in spontaneous tribute.
Then only a featured member of the cast, she was swiftly elevated to equal costar billing with Joseph Schildkraut, a star since 1921. Her admirers include such seasoned and distinguished members of the profession as Sir Laurence Olivier, Lillian Gish, Tallulah Bankhead, Jessica Tandy and Franchot Tone, all of whom have volunteered high praise for her luminous artistry. It is doubtful if any other actress ever started so definitely at the top. The only question raised is whether, having reached the shining pinnacle so young, so quickly, so effortlessly, she can maintain her sense of balance. The answer is inclined to be favorable, because one sees in her a sort of spiritual sturdiness seldom felt in one so young.
According to Jack Gilford, the comedian (who plays with her in Anne), her fellow actors regard her somewhat with awe for the intensity of her dedication and for her sense of discipline and professional dependability. “She’s seventeen,” muses Gilford, “and all I can say is that I hope when I’m fifty-five I’ll have as much poise as she has now!”
Beneath the adult aura of calm, however, she gives at the same time the impression of almost bursting with a kind of very young and eager joy and the sort of electric intensity which precedes a summer storm. She is tiny—she weighs ninety-six pounds and is just a smidgen over five feet tall—and her appearance is completely untheatrical, her manner natural and unself-conscious. Yet there is always about her the sentience of that bright, mysterious inner flame which illumines her acting and stamps it with authority and style. If she continues as she has begun—and there seems to be little reason to think that she may not—she promises to become one of the most important figures in the history of the American theatre. Now she is a lovely, confident young girl, launched full speed ahead into the wide and wonderful seas of the future.