American Academy of Dramatic Arts

American Academy of Dramatic Arts (New York). The oldest ongoing American school of acting, it was founded in 1884 as the Lyceum Theatre School for Acting by Franklin Haven Sargent after Harvard, where he was a member of the faculty, rejected his plea to open a drama school there. Steele MacKaye, Lawrence Barrett, Charles and Daniel Frohman, and David Belasco were among its early associates. At first the curriculum was based on the conservative theories of François Delsarte, which were soon displaced, and the school pioneered in its student productions of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck. For a time it used the name New York School of Acting. The theories of its second director, Charles Jehlinger, were similar to those of Stanislavsky. Francis Fuller and then George Cuttingham succeeded Jehlinger. In 1974 the school opened a West Coast branch in Pasadena, with Michael Thomas as director. Among the school's famous graduates are Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracy, Lauren Bacall, Robert Redford, Anne Bancroft, Hume Cronyn, Ruth Gordon, Margaret Wycherly. Doris Keane, Jason Robards Jr., Elizabeth Franz, and Judd Hirsch.