Celia Feinman Adler was an American actress, known as the "First Lady of the Yiddish Theatre".
Background
she was born Tzirele Adler in New York, New York, the daughter of Jacob P. Adler and Dina Stettin, who were both actors. Her father, a tragedian, was a pillar of Yiddish theater and was also successful on Broadway.
Her mother, one of Jacob Adler's several wives, earned renown for her acting in Britain and the United States and often worked with her husband.
Indeed, there was much to scream about. Her mother had arrived in New York from London only weeks before and soon would divorce Jacob Adler for his infidelity. She refused alimony out of pride and though the broken family continued to work together and enjoy success in the theater, Forman and her mother had to struggle to make ends meet. Forman's mother married actor and playwright Sigmund Feinman, who treated Forman as if she were his own child.
Career
She used Feinman's last name until the age of eighteen, when she changed it to Adler for the stage. At the age of six months, Forman made her first appearance on stage.
Terrified by the sight of her father in makeup, little Celia (as she became known soon after her birth) began to cry backstage during a play. Her mother quieted her until she had to perform (ironically, as a mother about to lose her infant child). Afraid to disturb Celia, her mother used her in place of a doll.
Once on stage, Forman was in her element. She gave the audience such a curious, wideeyed look that they broke out in laughter and applause. Her second appearance, at the age of two-and-a-half, was also spontaneous, as were many of the Yiddish theater's finest moments.
Forman's mother, angered by Adler's third wife's attempts to keep him from seeing her daughter, dressed Celia up in a fez and placed her on stage during a Turkish operetta in which Adler was starring.
When Adler saw her, he picked her up and improvised lines of joy, to which Celia replied, "Quiet, there's a pway!" Forman went on to play many child roles, but as a teenager she rebelled against the theater and left it. During this period, her stepfather died and Forman went to work as a piano teacher.
Her mentor, Bertha Kalisch, brought Forman back to the theater by insisting that she costar with her in a production of Sudermann's Die Heimat (Magda).
Forman received such a favorable review that she decided that her destiny was the theater.
She starred in plays by Yiddish authors as well as in the translated dramas of Ibsen, Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov, Hauptmann, and others.
Her English-language performances include Men in White, Success Story, and A Flag Is Born in 1946 with Paul Muni. She made her last appearance on Broadway in 1961 in Women in Horseradish. But her greatest commitment was always to the Yiddish theater. In 1918, Forman helped found the Yiddish Art Theater at the Irving Place Theater in Manhattan.
Forman eventually broke away from the Yiddish Art Theater to help found the Jewish Art Theater (Naye Teatr). She performed in nearly every European capital and in 1936 toured South America.
During one performance in a village in Argentina, Forman was warned that a local dog always walked into the theater and howled in approval during performances. Annoyed, Forman nevertheless went on with the play. But when the dog failed to appear and not a howl was heard, she felt disappointed and wondered if she had acted well.
Though her formal education did not extend beyond high school, Forman regarded the theater as a realm of perpetual study and refinement of craft. To her advantage, she spoke a clear, beautiful Yiddish. She made great efforts to move Yiddish theater away from shund (literally "trash, " or "low" theater) and toward kunst (literally "art, " or "high" theater).
Forman felt that the charming spontaneity of Yiddish theater's early years inhibited its evolution toward the more disciplined art form espoused by Jacob Gordin and other kunst playwrights.
In 1960, Forman's two-volume study, The Yiddish Theater in America, appeared in Yiddish. An English translation exists but remains unpublished. Even after Forman entered a nursing home in 1975 well into her eighties, she continued to perform. A week before she died of a stroke at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx in New York City, she performed several roles in a one-act monologue, and at the time of her death she was preparing for another performance.
Achievements
Views
Deeply proud of Yiddish culture, Forman worried over its demise. She blamed the decline of the Yiddish Art Theater on the star system, in which a star actor took the leading role in a play "whether or not the star fitted the role. " The star would also automatically become manager, casting agent, director, and coach and would often succumb to self-promotion at the rest of the cast's expense. "This insidious poison, " as Forman described the star system, set the actors in competition against each other for the limelight. Forman preferred repertory theater, in which actors played a variety of roles. She also believed it was a mistake for Yiddish theater to imitate Broadway in order to attract an Americanized Jewish audience.
Quotations:
Forman later said of her birth: "I made my screaming appearance into our sinful world on the fourth floor of a tenement house on Clinton Street. "
"But just the opposite was the result, " she wrote. "In aping Broadway, our theatre was shorn of the Jewish tone, the melody of Jewish charm. Why go to see Broadway imitated when one could go right to Broadway and see the real thing?"
Personality
Famous for her large, dark eyes and versatile facial expressions, Forman would earn a reputation as "the first lady of Yiddish theater. "
Connections
She met her first husband, actor Lazar Freed; they had one child. Married on August 14, 1914, Forman and Freed divorced in 1919. In 1930, Forman married her manager, Jack Cone, who died in 1955. In 1959 she married New York businessman Nathan Forman, whose death preceded hers by one month.