New York Times (05/Feb/2009) - Mira Rostova, Coach to Montgomery Clift, Dies at 99
(c) The New York Times (05/Feb/2009)
- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/movies/06rostova.html
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, I Confess (1953), Montgomery Clift, New York City, New York
Mira Rostova, Coach to Montgomery Clift, Dies at 99
Mira Rostova, a longtime New York acting teacher whose scene-by-scene, line-by-line coaching of Montgomery Clift earned his unwavering devotion — and the aggravation of not a few of Clift’s directors and co-stars — died on Jan. 28 in Manhattan. She was 99.
Her death, in a nursing home, was announced by the actress Zohra Lampert, a close friend and one of the many students Ms. Rostova taught over nearly 60 years. She left no known immediate survivors.
Others who studied under Ms. Rostova include Alec Baldwin, Jessica Lange, Jerry Orbach, Peter Gallagher and, for one session, Madonna. But her greatest influence was on Clift; the two would spend hours discussing which roles he should take and how he should perform them, according to the Clift biographer Patricia Bosworth, and Clift would put her on salary as his coach while making some of his most famous movies, including “The Heiress” and “A Place in the Sun.”
Ms. Rostova and Clift met in 1942, when they appeared together in New York in an experimental play, “Mexican Mural,” directed by Robert Lewis, a founding member of the pioneering Group Theater. Mr. Lewis had taken on Ms. Rostova, a recent Russian immigrant, as a scholarship student in his acting class, and he cast her as a fake witch doctor in the play.
By 1945, when a 24-year-old Clift took the starring role in the Tennessee Williams-Donald Windham play “You Touched Me!,” Ms. Rostova was ensconced in his dressing room. When he bristled at living at home with his mother, Ms. Rostova moved him into her apartment and found herself other lodgings.
And when Alfred Hitchcock directed him in “I Confess,” Ms. Rostova stood behind a pillar, where Clift could look to her for approval during scenes. (Not everyone was as accommodating: Elia Kazan banished Ms. Rostova from the set of “Wild River” after one day of filming, and Olivia de Havilland complained that Clift was always looking in the opposite direction while they filmed “The Heiress.”)
In 1954, when Clift, by then a movie star, returned to the New York stage, it was in an Off Broadway production of “The Seagull,” with a new translation by Ms. Rostova, who also played Nina.
Russian was the first of three languages she learned. Born Mira Rosovskaya in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 10, 1909, she left the country with her family after the 1917 revolution. After a brief time in Switzerland, she began her acting career in Vienna and Weimar-era Hamburg, Germany. With the rise of the Nazi party, she fled first to France and then to England before reaching the United States, at which point she shortened her name to Rostova.
Unlike Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof and other prominent acting teachers, Ms. Rostova made relatively few forays into acting herself. And while many have categorized her teaching as an offshoot of the Method acting technique that Konstantin Stanislavski made famous, Ms. Rostova forged a different school of instruction, Ms. Lampert said, using words like “personal, common sense and communicable” to describe it. “She was just so humane,” she added.
And “formidable,” said Kevin McCarthy, a close friend of Clift’s who also benefited from Ms. Rostova’s guidance when he filmed his Oscar-nominated role in “Death of a Salesman” (1951).
“She knew how it was supposed to be,” Mr. McCarthy said, “and her opinions were not to be argued with. Luckily, she was always right.”
