Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli is an American actress and singer. Best known for her Academy Award-winning performance in Cabaret, she is known for her energetic stage presence and her powerful mezzo-soprano singing voice, she is the daughter of Vincente Minnelli. She is of Italian and mixed European descent. Seeking theatrical work, Minnelli moved to New York City in 1961, where she began her career as a musical theatre actress, nightclub performer and traditional pop music artist, she made her professional stage debut in the 1963 Off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward and won a Tony Award for starring in Flora the Red Menace in 1965, which marked the start of her lifelong collaboration with John Kander and Fred Ebb. They wrote, produced or directed many of Minnelli's future stage acts and TV shows and helped create her stage persona of a stylized survivalist, including her career-defining performances of anthems of survival. Along with her roles on stage and screen, this persona and her style of performance added to Minnelli's status as an enduring gay icon.
Critically lauded for her early non-musical screen performances—especially The Sterile Cuckoo —Minnelli rose to international stardom, starring in Cabaret and the Emmy Award-winning TV special Liza with a Z. Most of her following films — including Lucky Lady, New York, New York, Rent-a-Cop and Stepping Out —were panned by the critics and bombed at the box office, she had no more major movie hits except Arthur, she returned to Broadway on a number of occasions, including The Act, The Rink and Liza's at The Palace.... Worked on various television formats and has predominantly focused on music hall and nightclub performances since the late 1970s, her concert performances at Carnegie Hall in 1979 and 1987, at Radio City Music Hall in 1991 and 1992 are recognized among her most successful. From 1988 to 1990, she toured with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. in Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event. Best known for her renditions of pop standards, Minnelli's early 1960s pop singles were produced to attract a young audience, her albums from 1968 to 1977 contained much of the contemporary singer-songwriter material.
In 1989, she ventured into the contemporary pop scene by collaborating with the Pet Shop Boys on the album Results. After a hiatus due to serious health problems, Minnelli returned to the concert stage in 2002 with Liza's Back and was an acclaimed guest star in the sitcom Arrested Development between 2003 and 2013. Since the 2010s, she has avoided huge concert tours in favor of small retrospective performances. Minnelli was born on March 12, 1946 in Hollywood, California to Vincente Minnelli. In 1961 she moved to New York City, attending High School of Performing Arts and Chadwick School, her first performing experience on film was at age three appearing in the final scene of the musical In the Good Old Summertime. Minnelli has a half-sister and half-brother, from Garland's marriage to Sid Luft, she has Christiane Nina Minnelli, from her father's second marriage. Minnelli's godparents were her husband William Spier, her parents named her after Ira Gershwin's song "Liza". During 1961, Minnelli was an apprentice at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Massachusetts.
She played the part of Muriel in Take Me Along. Minnelli began performing professionally at age 17, in 1963, in an Off-Broadway revival of the musical Best Foot Forward, for which she received the Theatre World Award; the next year, her mother invited Liza to perform with her in concert at the London Palladium. Both concerts were released as an album, she attended Scarsdale High School for one year, starring in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank which went to Israel on tour. She turned to Broadway at 19, won her first Tony Award as a leading actress for Flora the Red Menace, it was the first time she worked with the musical duo John Fred Ebb. Minnelli began as a nightclub singer as an adolescent, making her professional nightclub debut at the age of 19 at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D. C; that same year she began appearing in other clubs and on stage in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City. Her success as a live performer led to her recording several albums for Capitol Records: Liza!
Liza!, It Amazes Me, There Is a Time. In her early years, she recorded traditional pop standards as well as show tunes from various musicals in which she starred; because of this fact, William Ruhlmann named her "Barbra Streisand's little sister". The Capitol albums Liza! Liza!, It Amazes Me, There Is A Time were reissued on the two-CD compilation The Capitol Years in 2001, in their entirety. From 1968 to the 1970s, she recorded her albums Liza Minnelli, Come Saturday Morning and New Feelin' for A&M Records, she released Tropical Nights on Columbia Records. In 1989, Minnelli collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys on an electronic dance-style album; the release hit the top 10 in the UK and charted in the U. S. spawning four singles: "Losing My Mind". That year, she performed "Losing My Mind" live at the Grammys ceremony before receiving a Grammy Legend Award. With this award, she became one of only 16 people – in a list that includes composer Richard Rodgers, Whoopi Go
Theatre director
A theatre director or stage director is an instructor in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production by unifying various endeavours and aspects of production. The director's function is to ensure the quality and completeness of theatre production and to lead the members of the creative team into realizing their artistic vision for it; the director therefore collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff, coordinating research, costume design, lighting design, set design, stage combat, sound design for the production. If the production he or she is mounting is a new piece of writing or a translation of a play, the director may work with the playwright or translator. In contemporary theatre, after the playwright, the director is the primary visionary, making decisions on the artistic concept and interpretation of the play and its staging. Different directors occupy different places of authority and responsibility, depending on the structure and philosophy of individual theatre companies.
Directors use a wide variety of techniques and levels of collaboration. In ancient Greece, the birthplace of European drama, the writer bore principal responsibility for the staging of his plays. Actors were semi-professionals, the director oversaw the mounting of plays from the writing process all the way through to their performance acting in them too, as Aeschylus for example did; the author-director would train the chorus, sometimes compose the music, supervise every aspect of production. The fact that the director was called didaskalos, the Greek word for "teacher," indicates that the work of these early directors combined instructing their performers with staging their work. In medieval times, the complexity of vernacular religious drama, with its large scale mystery plays that included crowd scenes and elaborate effects, gave the role of director considerable importance. A miniature by Jean Fouquet from 1460 bears one of the earliest depictions of a director at work. Holding a prompt book, the central figure directs, with the aid of a long stick, the proceedings of the staging of a dramatization of the Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia.
According to Fouquet, the director's tasks included overseeing the erecting of a stage and scenery and directing the actors, addressing the audience at the beginning of each performance and after each intermission. From Renaissance times up until the 19th century, the role of director was carried by the actor-manager; this would be a senior actor in a troupe who took the responsibility for choosing the repertoire of work, staging it and managing the company. This was the case for instance with Commedia dell'Arte companies and English actor-managers like Colley Cibber and David Garrick; the modern theatre director can be said to have originated in the staging of elaborate spectacles of the Meininger Company under George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The management of large numbers of extras and complex stagecraft matters necessitated an individual to take on the role of overall coordinator; this gave rise to the role of the director in modern theatre, Germany would provide a platform for a generation of emerging visionary theatre directors, such as Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt.
Constantin Stanislavski, principally an actor-manager, would set up the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia and emancipate the role of the director as artistic visionary. The French regisseur is sometimes used to mean a stage director, most in ballet. A more common term for theatre director in French is metteur en scène. Post World War II, the actor-manager started to disappear, directing become a fledged artistic activity within the theatre profession; the director originating artistic vision and concept, realizing the staging of a production, became the norm rather than the exception. Great forces in the emancipation of theatre directing as a profession were notable 20th-century theatre directors like Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Yuri Lyubimov, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Bertolt Brecht, Giorgio Strehler and Franco Zeffirelli. A cautionary note was introduced by the famed director Sir Tyrone Guthrie who said "the only way to learn how to direct a play, is... to get a group of actors simple enough to allow you to let you direct them, direct".
A number of seminal works on directing and directors include Toby Cole and Helen Krich's 1972 Directors on Directing: A Sourcebook of the Modern Theatre, Edward Braun's 1982 book The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Growtowski and Will's The Director in a Changing Theatre. Because of the late emergence of theatre directing as a performing arts profession when compared with for instance acting or musicianship, a rise of professional vocational training programmes in directing can be seen in the second half of the 20th century. Most European countries nowadays know some form of professional directing training at drama schools or conservatoires, or at universities. In Britain, the tradition that theatre directors emerge from degree courses at the Oxbridge universities has meant that for a long time, professional vocational training did not take place at drama schools or performing arts colleges, although an increase in
Christopher Reeve
Christopher D'Olier Reeve was an American actor who played DC comic book superhero Superman, beginning with the acclaimed Superman, for which he won a BAFTA Award. Reeve appeared in other critically acclaimed films such as The Bostonians, Street Smart and The Remains of the Day, he received a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe Award nomination for his performance in the television remake of Rear Window. On May 27, 1995, Reeve was left quadriplegic after being thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia, he needed a portable ventilator to breathe for the rest of his life. He lobbied on behalf of people with spinal cord injuries and for human embryonic stem cell research, founding the Christopher Reeve Foundation and co-founding the Reeve-Irvine Research Center. Christopher D'Olier Reeve was born on September 25, 1952, in New York City, the son of Barbara Pitney Lamb, a journalist, Franklin D'Olier Reeve, a teacher, novelist and scholar. Reeve was of entirely English ancestry, with many family lines, in America since the early 17th century.
His paternal grandfather, Colonel Richard Henry Reeve, had been the CEO of Prudential Financial for over 25 years. Reeve's father was a Princeton University graduate studying for a master's degree in Russian at Columbia University before the birth of his son, Christopher. Despite being born wealthy, Franklin Reeve spent summers working at the docks with longshoremen. Reeve's mother had been a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, but transferred to Barnard College to be closer to Franklin, whom she had met through a family connection, they had another son, born on October 6, 1953. Franklin and Barbara divorced in 1956, she moved with her two sons to Princeton, New Jersey, where they attended Nassau Street School; that year, Franklin Reeve married Helen Schmidinger, a Columbia University graduate student. Barbara Pitney Lamb married Tristam B. Johnson, a stockbroker, in 1959. Johnson enrolled Christopher and his brother, Benjamin, in Princeton Country Day School, which merged with Miss Fine's School for Girls to become the co-educational Princeton Day School.
Reeve excelled academically and onstage. The sportsmanship award at Princeton Day School's invitational hockey tournament was named in Reeve's honor. Reeve admitted that he put pressure on himself to act older than he was in order to gain his father's approval. Reeve found his passion for acting in 1962 at age nine when he was cast in an amateur version of the operetta The Yeomen of the Guard. In mid-1968, at age fifteen, Reeve was accepted as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts; the other apprentices were college students, but Reeve's older appearance and maturity helped him fit in with the others. In a workshop, he played a scene from A View from the Bridge, chosen to be presented in front of an audience. After the performance, actress Olympia Dukakis said to him, "I'm surprised. You've got a lot of talent. Don't mess it up." The next summer, Reeve was hired at the Harvard Summer Repertory Theater Company in Cambridge for $44 per week. He played a Russian sailor in The Belyayev in A Month in the Country.
Famed theater critic Elliot Norton called his performance as Belyayev "startlingly effective." The 23-year-old lead actress in the play, a Carnegie Mellon graduate, turned out to be Reeve's first romance. She was engaged to a fellow Carnegie Mellon graduate at the time. Reeve's romance with the actress fizzled a few months when the age difference became an issue. Reeve was involved with Scientology but opted out of becoming a member, he subsequently voiced criticism of the organization. After graduating from Princeton Day School in June 1970, Reeve acted in plays in Maine, he planned to go to New York City to find a career in theater. However, at the advice of his mother, he applied for college, he was accepted into Princeton University in New Jersey. Reeve said that he chose Cornell because it was distanced from New York City and because of the temptations of working as an actor versus finishing college, as he had promised his mother and step-father. Reeve joined the theater department in Cornell, played Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Segismundo in Life Is a Dream, Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Polixenes in The Winter's Tale.
Late in his freshman year, Reeve received a letter from Stark Hesseltine, a high-powered New York City agent who had discovered Robert Redford and who represented actors such as Richard Chamberlain, Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon. Hesseltine wanted to represent him. Reeve was excited and kept re-reading the letter to make sure of what it said. Reeve was anxious to get on with his career; the two met, but Reeve was surprised to find that Hesseltine supported his promise to his mother and step-father to complete college. They decided that instead of dropping out of school, Reeve would come to New York once a month to meet casting agents and producers to find wor
Acting
Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts a character—in theatre, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode. Acting involves a broad range of skills, including a well-developed imagination, emotional facility, physical expressivity, vocal projection, clarity of speech, the ability to interpret drama. Acting demands an ability to employ dialects, improvisation and emulation, stage combat. Many actors train at length in specialist colleges to develop these skills; the vast majority of professional actors have undergone extensive training. Actors and actresses will have many instructors and teachers for a full range of training involving singing, scene-work, audition techniques, acting for camera. Most early sources in the West that examine the art of acting discuss it as part of rhetoric. One of the first known actors is believed to have been an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria. Writing two centuries after the event, Aristotle in his Poetics suggests that Thespis stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus and addressed it as a separate character.
Before Thespis, the chorus narrated. When Thespis stepped out from the chorus, he spoke. To distinguish between these different modes of storytelling—enactment and narration—Aristotle uses the terms "mimesis" and "diegesis". From Thespis' name derives the word "thespian". A professional actor is someone, paid to act. Professional actors sometimes undertake unpaid work for a variety of reasons, including educational purposes or for charity events. Amateur actors are those. Not all people working as actors in film, television, or theatre are professionally trained. Bob Hoskins, for example, had no formal training before becoming an actor. Conservatories and drama schools offer two- to four-year training on all aspects of acting. Universities offer three- to four-year programs, in which a student is able to choose to focus on acting, whilst continuing to learn about other aspects of theatre. Schools vary in their approach, but in North America the most popular method taught derives from the'system' of Konstantin Stanislavski, developed and popularised in America as method acting by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, others.
Other approaches may include a more physically based orientation, such as that promoted by theatre practitioners as diverse as Anne Bogart, Jacques Lecoq, Jerzy Grotowski, or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Classes may include psychotechnique, mask work, physical theatre and acting for camera. Regardless of a school's approach, students should expect intensive training in textual interpretation and movement. Applications to drama programmes and conservatories involve extensive auditions. Anybody over the age of 18 can apply. Training may start at a young age. Acting classes and professional schools targeted at under-18s are widespread; these classes introduce young actors to different aspects of acting and theatre, including scene study. Increased training and exposure to public speaking allows humans to maintain calmer and more relaxed physiologically. By measuring a public speaker’s heart rate maybe one of the easiest ways to judge shifts in stress as the heart rate increases with anxiety; as actors increase performances, heart rate and other evidence of stress can decrease.
This is important in training for actors, as adaptive strategies gained from increased exposure to public speaking can regulate implicit and explicit anxiety. By attending an institution with a specialization in acting, increased opportunity to act will lead to more relaxed physiology and decrease in stress and its effects on the body; these effects can vary from hormonal to cognitive health that can impact quality of life and performance Some classical forms of acting involve a substantial element of improvised performance. Most notable is its use by the troupes of the commedia dell'arte, a form of masked comedy that originated in Italy. Improvisation as an approach to acting formed an important part of the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski's'system' of actor training, which he developed from the 1910s onwards. Late in 1910, the playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar" of acting.
Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that utilised the techniques of the commedia dell'arte, Gorky suggested that they form a company, modelled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski's use was extended further in the approaches to acting developed by his students, Michael Chekhov and Maria Knebel. In the United Kingdom, the use of improvisation was pioneered by Joan Littlewood from the 1930s onwards and by Keith Johnstone and Clive Barker. In the United States, it was promoted by Viola Spolin, after working with Neva Boyd at a Hull House in Chicago, Illinois. Like the British practitioners, Spolin felt that playing games was a useful means of training actors and helped to improve an actor's performance. With improvisation, she argued, people may find expressive freedom, since they do not know how an improvised situation will turn out.
Improvisation demands an open mind
Geraldine Page
Geraldine Sue Page was an American actress. She earned acclaim for her work on Broadway as well as in major Hollywood films and television productions, garnering an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, one BAFTA Award, four nominations for the Tony Award. A native of Kirksville, Page studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg in New York City before being cast in her first credited part in the Western film Hondo, which earned her her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, she was subsequently blacklisted in Hollywood based on her association with Hagen and did not work in film for eight years. Page continued to appear in television and on stage and earned her first Tony Award nomination for her performance in Sweet Bird of Youth, a role she reprised in the 1961 film adaptation, the latter of which earned her a Golden Globe Award, she earned additional Academy Award nominations for her roles in You're a Big Boy Now and Pete'n' Tillie, followed by a Tony nomination for her performance in the stage production of Absurd Person Singular.
Other film appearances during this time included in the thrillers What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? Opposite Ruth Gordon, The Beguiled opposite Clint Eastwood. In 1977, she provided the voice of Madam Medusa in Walt Disney's The Rescuers, followed by a role in Woody Allen's Interiors, which earned her a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. After being inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979 for her stage work, Page returned to Broadway with a lead role in Agnes of God, earning her her third Tony Award nomination. Page was nominated for Academy Awards for her performances in The Pope of Greenwich Village and The Trip to Bountiful, the latter of which earned her the award for Best Actress. Page died in New York City 1987 in the midst of a Broadway run of Blithe Spirit, for which she earned her fourth Tony Award nomination. Page was born November 22, 1924 in Kirksville, the second child of Edna Pearl and Leon Elwin Page who worked at Andrew Taylor Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery.
He was an author whose works included Practical Anatomy, Osteopathic Fundamentals, The Old Doctor. She had Donald. At age five, Page relocated with her family to Illinois. Raised a Methodist and her family were active parishioners of the Englewood Methodist Church in Chicago, where she had her first foray into acting within the church's theatre group, playing Jo March in a 1941 production of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. After graduating from Chicago's Englewood Technical Prep Academy, she attended the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the intention of becoming a visual artist or pianist. After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945, Page studied acting at the Herbert Berghof School and the American Theatre Wing in New York City, studying with Uta Hagen for seven years, at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. During this time, Page would return to Chicago in the summers to perform in repertory theatre in Lake Zurich, where she and several fellow actors had established their own independent theater company.
While attempting to establish her career, she worked various odd jobs, including as a hat-check girl, theater usher, lingerie model, a factory laborer. Page, a trained method actor, spent five years appearing in various repertory theater productions in the Midwest and New York after graduating from college. On October 25, 1945, she made her New York stage debut in Seven Mirrors, a play devised by Immaculate Heart High School students from Los Angeles; the play ran for a total of 23 performances at Blackfriars Repertory Theatre on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In February 1952, director José Quintero cast Page in a minor role in Yerma, a theatrical interpretation of a poem by Federico García Lorca, staged at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City's Greenwich Village. Page was subsequently cast in the role of Alma in the Quintero-directed production of Summer and Smoke, written by Tennessee Williams. Page's role in Summer and Smoke garnered her significant exposure, including a Drama Desk Award, a profile in Time magazine.
Her official film debut and role in Hondo, opposite John Wayne, garnering her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Prior, she appeared in an uncredited role in Taxi. Speaking to a Kirksville newspaper, she said: "Actually Hondo wasn't my first movie. I had one small, but satisfactory scene in a Dan Dailey picture called Taxi, filmed in New York." Page was blacklisted in Hollywood after her debut in Hondo based on her association with Uta Hagen and did not work in film for nearly ten years. Her work continued on Broadway playing a spinster in the 1954–1955 production of The Rainmaker, written by N. Richard Nash. Page remained friends with Dean until his death the following year and kept several personal mementos from the play—including two drawings by him. After Page's death, these items were acquired by Heritage Auctions in 2006. In 1959, Page earned an Emmy nomination, of Best Single Performance by an Actress, for her role in the Playhouse 90 episode "The Old
Al Pacino
Alfredo James Pacino is an American actor and filmmaker who has had a career spanning more than five decades. He has received numerous accolades and honors both competitive and honorary, among them an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, four Golden Globe Awards, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award and the National Medal of Arts, he is one of few performers to have won a competitive Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award for acting, dubbed the "Triple Crown of Acting". A method actor and former student of the HB Studio and the Actors Studio in New York City, where he was taught by Charlie Laughton and Lee Strasberg, Pacino made his feature film debut with a minor role in Me, Natalie and gained favorable notice for his lead role as a heroin addict in The Panic in Needle Park, he achieved international acclaim and recognition for his breakthrough role as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather receiving his first Oscar nomination and would reprise the role in the successful sequels The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III.
Pacino's performance as Michael Corleone in these films is regarded as one of the greatest screen performances in film history. Pacino received his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for Serpico, and Justice for All and won the award in 1993 for his performance as blind Lieutenant Colonel Slade in Scent of a Woman. For his performances in The Godfather, Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross, Pacino was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Other notable roles include Tony Montana in Scarface, Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way, Lieutenant Vincent Hanna in Heat, Benjamin Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco, Lowell Bergman in The Insider and Detective Will Dormer in Insomnia. In television, Pacino has acted in several productions for HBO, including the miniseries Angels in America and the Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don't Know Jack. In addition to his work in film, Pacino has had an extensive career on stage, he is a two-time Tony Award winner, in 1969 and 1977, for his performances in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, respectively.
A lifelong fan of Shakespeare, Pacino directed and starred in Looking for Richard, a documentary film about the play Richard III, a role which Pacino had earlier portrayed on stage in 1977. He has acted as Shylock in a 2004 feature film adaptation and a 2010 stage production of The Merchant of Venice. Having made his filmmaking debut with Looking for Richard, Pacino has directed and starred in the independent film Chinese Coffee and the films Wilde Salomé and Salomé, about the play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. Since 1994, Pacino has been the joint president of the Actors Studio with Ellen Burstyn and Harvey Keitel. In 2016, he received the Kennedy Center Honor. Pacino was born in East Harlem, New York City, to Italian American parents Salvatore and Rose Pacino, his parents divorced. His mother took him to The Bronx where they lived with her parents and James Gerardi who were immigrants from Corleone, Sicily, his father, from San Fratello in the Province of Messina, moved to Covina, California to work as an insurance salesman and restaurateur.
In his teenage years, Pacino was known as "Sonny" to his friends. He had ambitions to become a baseball player and was nicknamed "The Actor". Pacino attended Herman Ridder Junior High School, but by secondary school he had dropped out of most of his classes except for English, he subsequently attended the High School of Performing Arts, after gaining admission by audition. His mother disagreed with his decision and, after an argument, he left home. To finance his acting studies, Pacino took low-paying jobs as messenger, busboy and postal clerk, once worked in the mailroom for Commentary magazine. Pacino began smoking and drinking at age nine, used marijuana casually at age 13, but he abstained from hard drugs, his two closest friends died from drug abuse at the ages of 19 and 30. Growing up in the Bronx, Pacino got into occasional fights and was considered somewhat of a troublemaker at school, he acted in basement plays in New York's theatrical underground but was rejected as a teenager by the Actors Studio.
Pacino joined the Herbert Berghof Studio, where he met acting teacher Charlie Laughton, who became his mentor and best friend. In this period, he was unemployed and homeless, sometimes slept on the street, in theaters, or at friends' houses. In 1962, his mother died at the age of 43; the following year, Pacino's grandfather James Gerardi died. Pacino recalled it as "the lowest point of my life". After four years at HB Studio, Pacino auditioned for the Actors Studio; the Actors Studio is a membership organization of professional actors, theatre directors, playwrights in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. Pacino studied "method acting" under acting coach Lee Strasberg, who appeared with Pacino in the films The Godfather Part II and in... And Justice for All. During interviews he spoke about Strasberg and the Studio's effect on his career. "The Actors Studio meant so much to me in my life. Lee Strasberg hasn't been given the credit he deserves
