Michael Chekhov — actor (acting method) with roots in the Russian Empire
Mikhail Alexandrovich Chekhov was born in St Petersburg on 29 August 1891, the son of Alexander Chekhov, the elder brother of the playwright Anton Chekhov, and Natalya Golden. His uncle noted the four-year-old's talent in a letter of 1895. From 1907 to 1911 he studied at the theatre school of Alexei Suvorin's Maly Theatre in St Petersburg, graduating with honours.
In 1912 Konstantin Stanislavsky invited him to join the Moscow Art Theatre, and he became one of the leading actors of its First Studio, where Stanislavsky's system was being worked out; Stanislavsky later called him his most brilliant pupil. His Khlestakov in Gogol's The Government Inspector and his Hamlet were among the best-known performances of the Moscow stage. From 1922 or 1923 he led the First Studio when it became an independent company, the Second Moscow Art Theatre, as actor, director and teacher, experimenting with the ideas of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner and with a physical, imaginative approach to acting. In 1928 he left the company and the Soviet Union.
He worked in Germany, France, Latvia and Lithuania, and from 1935 or 1936 ran the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall in Devon, at the invitation of the actress Beatrice Straight. In January 1939 the studio reopened in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and his company, the Chekhov Players, toured the United States; among the young actors who studied with him and toured with the troupe in 1941 was Yul Brynner.
In the 1940s he settled in Hollywood, teaching and acting in films. As the psychoanalyst Dr Brulov in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) he received his only Academy Award nomination, and he also appeared in Specter of the Rose (1946) and Rhapsody (1954). His students in these years are said to have included Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance and Marilyn Monroe. His book To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting, completed with his assistant Deirdre Hurst du Prey and published in 1953, set out what became known as the Chekhov technique, centred on imagination, atmosphere and the 'psychological gesture'.
He died in Beverly Hills on 30 September 1955, aged sixty-four. A further book, To the Director and Playwright, was published from his lecture notes in 1962.
"Left the Soviet Union in 1928; worked in Germany, France, Latvia and Lithuania, then England (Dartington Hall) and from 1939 the United States."
Migration storyTracing the roots — St Petersburg (Russia)
Born in St Petersburg in 1891, the son of Anton Chekhov's elder brother Alexander, he trained at the Suvorin theatre school, joined the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912 and led the Second Moscow Art Theatre until he left the Soviet Union in 1928.
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St Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.