Celia Adler

Celia Adler was born in New York City in 1891 and was known as the "First Lady of the Yiddish Theatre."

She was best known for her work in the Yiddish theatre, especially during the heyday of Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, in which she acted during the 1920s and 30s.

Even though she was a mature woman and a mother, she would play the role of a ten- to thirteen-year-old child.

She also starred in the Yiddish film, "Where Is My Child?"

In the American Theatre, Celia also gave a fine theatrical performance as a Holocaust survivor in Luther Adler's 1946 Broadway production of "A Flag is Born," which also starred Marlon Brando and Paul Muni.

Celia was the daughter of Jacob P Adler and Dinah Shtettin, and she was the older half-sister of Stella and Luther Adler, and Jacob Adler's five other children.

In Celia's autobiography, "The Celia Adler Story," she writes about the serious task of acting:

"... Much more serious, however, is the matter of roles — what role you get and how to play it…. The words themselves are not yet the role. Between the words is hidden the character they must portray. So the actor has to deepen himself, dig into and dissect every word, every phrase, every thought to discover and experience the character’s soul. We have to grope quite frequently and attempt to fathom the life of the character involved for many, many years before he appears on the stage. We also must work very much on and with ourselves, with our figure, our voice, our mimicry and movement until we succeed in creating the person the author hid in his words. As you can see, this is no easy matter.

Understand, I speak here of actors with a serious approach to the theatre. I am underscoring this again and again, because, unfortunately, there is a considerable number of actors in our profession who couldn’t care less about all these things. They do their day’s work on the stage just like any worker in a shop. I have often heard that even in a shop, there are also craftsmen who have a serious, knowledgeable approach to their work and others who behave recklessly and irresponsibly — just so it’s over and done with. In the craftsmanship of the theatre, the difference between sincerity and recklessness is a much more important factor than in a shop.

I must admit here that when I previously spoke of the hardships the serious actor undergoes in the creation of his role, I had in mind roles in plays written by authors who were literary artists, creations that — whether it be the theme or the situation or the individual characters — are built with an artistic viewpoint, with psychological analysis, and are woven as a result, from logical, human behavior. Here we are helped by the author’s artistic creation to search for, to fathom our roles.

We are also subject to playing roles in so-called theatrical concoctions in which there isn’t an inkling of any of these things. As our great David Kessler used to say in ridicule: “Plays written with the knee and thought out with the heel — without logic, without substance of body, without human portraits. For a serious actor to fathom his role in such concoctions is virtually splitting of the Red Sea by Moses.”

And I don’t have to say here that the young actor has no jurisdiction over the selection of roles. Very seldom does he even have a say in which theatre he will be booked. How goes the saying: “If you want to go to war, you have to smell powder.” But I can assure you with a clear conscience that the serious artist will not agree to go and play a role, even in the worst literary trash, until he fathoms the character and knows for sure why he will do, what he will do and say, what he says on the stage. And not having the help of the author’s notes, he must fathom it with his own intuition."