Michael Chekhov

Origins and early life

Michael Chekhov was born in Saint Petersburg on 29 August 1891, the son of Alexander Chekhov, elder brother of the writer Anton Chekhov, and of Alexander's second wife Natalia Alexandrovna Golden, who is described in the scholarly literature — the Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov and independent encyclopaedic sources — as a Russian Jew; his Jewish descent is therefore on his mother's side, and this fiche states plainly that he was not raised in the Jewish religion and that the documentation for the descent is scholarly rather than archival.

Work and career

He entered Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre in 1912 and was, by Stanislavsky's own account, his most brilliant pupil; he led the theatre's First Studio, played Hamlet, Erik XIV and Khlestakov in performances that Russians of the 1920s spoke of for the rest of their lives, and directed the Second Moscow Art Theatre from 1924. His disagreements with the doctrine of socialist realism, and the accusation that his theatre was mystical and idealist, made his position impossible, and he left the Soviet Union in 1928, never to return.

He worked in Berlin with Max Reinhardt, in Latvia and Lithuania, then in England, where Beatrice Straight founded a studio for him at Dartington Hall, and from 1939 in the United States. Where Stanislavsky asked the actor to draw on personal memory, Chekhov taught the psychological gesture and the imagination: the actor invents a body for the character and lets the feeling follow the form. His book To the Actor (1953) and his Hollywood teaching reached Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, Yul Brynner and later Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1945, and died at Beverly Hills on 30 September 1955.