Sanford Meisner - Early Life

Early Life

Born in Brooklyn, Meisner was the oldest of four children. Sanford, Jacob, Ruth, and Robert were the children of Hermann Meisner, a furrier, and Bertha Knoepfler, both Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Hungary. In an attempt to improve Sanford's health, the family took a trip to the Catskills, where Jacob was fed unpasteurized milk. As a result, Jacob contracted bovine tuberculosis and died shortly thereafter. In an interview many years later, Meisner later identified this event as "the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped." Blamed by his parents for his brother's death, the young Meisner become isolated and withdrawn, unable to cope with feelings of guilt for his brother’s death.

He found release in playing the family piano and eventually attended the Damrosch Institute of Music (now the Juilliard School) where he studied to become a concert pianist. When the Great Depression hit, Meisner's father pulled him out of music school to help in the family business in New York City's Garment District. Meisner later recalled that the only way he could endure days spent lugging bolts of fabric was to entertain himself by replaying, in his mind, all the classical piano pieces he had studied in music school. Meisner believed this experience helped him develop an acute sense of sound, akin to perfect pitch. Later, as an acting teacher, he often evaluated his students' scene work with his eyes closed (and his head dramatically buried in his hands). This trick was only partly for effect; the habit, he explained, actually helped him to listen more closely to his students' work and to pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.

After graduation from high school, Meisner pursued acting professionally, which had interested him since his youth. He had acted at the Lower East Side's Chrystie Street Settlement House under the direction of Lee Strasberg, who was to play an important role in his development. At 19, Meisner heard that the Theatre Guild was hiring teenagers. After a brief interview, he was hired as an extra for They Knew What They Wanted. The experience deeply affected him and he realized that acting was what he had been looking for in life. He and Strasberg both appeared in the original Theatre Guild production of the Rodgers and Hart review The Garrick Gaieties, from which the song "Manhattan" came.