Lee Strasberg

Lee Strasberg was an American acting teacher and actor, born in 1901 in Austria-Hungary and brought to the United States in 1909, who became the leading American exponent of what came to be known as Method acting. Drawing on the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, he developed an approach that asked actors to draw on personal emotional memory to build psychologically truthful performances. From 1951 until his death he directed the Actors Studio in New York, training generations of American film and stage actors and shaping the naturalistic performance style that came to dominate American screen acting. He also appeared on screen himself, most notably as Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He died in New York in 1982.