by Stephen Vagg
Susan Strasberg was the daughter of acting legends, who, before she’d even turned twenty, had become a Broadway star, appeared in a Hollywood blockbuster, been given her own movie vehicle, and shagged Richard Burton multiple times. After that, things were something of an anti-climax, but it was a hell of a ride.
She was born in 1938. Dad was Lee Strasberg, the legendary acting coach who helped establish the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, which popularised Method acting; mother was Paula, an actor and acting coach for Marilyn Monroe. No one was surprised when Susan – nicknamed by some as “daughter of the Method” – started acting as a child. She was pretty, personable and talented, and began getting steady work from her early teens on television and the stage. Strasberg’s film debut came in MGM’s The Cobweb (1955), playing a mental patient who goes on a date with John Kerr (who, for a red-hot minute, was going to be the Next Big Thing). Reception to the movie was “meh”, but Strasberg’s personal notices were encouraging, and her next film was a blockbuster: Picnic (1955), where she played (very well) the bookish younger sister of Kim Novak.
Picnic firmly established Susan Strasberg as an actor in her own right; what made her famous – well, Broadway famous – was playing the title role in in the stage play version of The Diary of Anne Frank: this was a huge critical and commercial hit, turning Strasberg into the hottest ingenue on Broadway. The offers started pouring in, but her selection was not crash hot: she turned down the lead in Peyton Place (1957), the part played by Diane Varsi – this was a mistake as Strasberg would’ve been ideal. She also claimed to have rejected key roles in the career of Sandra Dee: Until They Sail (1957) (no loss) and Gidget (1959) (big mistake, Strasberg would’ve been perfect, and actually better casting than Dee).
Instead, Strasberg agreed to play the lead in her own vehicle – Stage Struck (1958), a remake by RKO in its dying days of the studio’s 1933 hit, Morning Glory, which had launched Katharine Hepburn to stardom. Stage Struck had exciting new talent (it was Christopher Plummer’s first feature, director Sidney Lumet’s second) and established names (Henry Fonda) and we can understand why Strasberg accepted the role; in hindsight though, it was a disastrous decision as she simply wasn’t up to the part. In its review of the film, Variety wrote that Strasberg “is not a conventional screen beauty but her face is expressive and lively. Her technique is formidable and her director seems to have been so bewitched by it that she receives virtually no restraint from him, and she needed some. Reactions to the young actress — here making her major motion picture debut — are likely to be highly individual and divided.”
Stage Struck/Morning Glory (which is based on a stage play) was/is full of scenes of men standing around awestruck by a young woman’s acting talent. It needed not just any actor, but an exceptional, generational talent – a young Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Kim Stanley, Florence Pugh etc. Strasberg was a good, likeable performer, but not an acting genius – the film exposed her limitations and did a lot of harm to her reputation in Hollywood.
To make things worse, Strasberg also missed being cast in the 1959 George Stevens film version of Anne Frank. Various reasons were given – Stevens wanting to make his own discovery and/or reluctance to deal with Strasberg’s mother. Strasberg didn’t go after the role and Millie Perkins got the part instead.
Strasberg had another Broadway hit in Time Remembered with Helen Hayes and Richard Burton, with whom Strasberg had a torrid affair. (Hayes was annoyed because she could hear her two co-stars going at it loudly in the dressing room next door throughout the run). Strasberg later had flings with Warren Beatty and Cary Grant, and why not, but her judgement about men doesn’t seem to have been the best: she wasted a lot of time hoping Burton would leave his wife, and later on married an abusive and violent man, actor Christopher Jones. Professionally, she guested in TV plays and did Shadow of a Gunman and Caesar and Cleopatra on stage.
Strasberg went to Europe to make the concentration camp drama, Kapo (1960), a hit in Italy if not the US. She enjoyed being away from her parents and decided to stay in Europe. Strasberg did a film for Hammer, Scream of Fear (1961), which was a box office success – and she was excellent as the wheelchair bound heroine. This should have opened up a whole new career for Strasberg as a lead in women in peril thrillers, but it didn’t, not really. She followed it with Disorder (1962) with Louis Jourdan, which no one much liked and an Italian-shot segment of Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962) with Richard Beymer, a film that was a big turkey.
Strasberg returned to the US, doing the Broadway flop Lady of the Camellias directed by Franco Zeffirelli. There seemed to be no more film offers in Hollywood, so she guested on TV on shows such as Dr Kildare. The Rank Organisation offered Strasberg the lead in The High Bright Sun (1965), playing a woman in peril (the peril being Cyprus during the emergency).
Roger Corman offered her the part of Peter Fonda’s wife in The Trip (1967) at AIP, featuring a sexy love making scene. That led to another AIP drug movie, Psych Out (1968) playing a deaf girl who romances Jack Nicholson; Richard Rush directed and Dick Clark produced. She did Chubasco (1968) with her actor husband Christopher Jones (the too-cool-for-school star of Wild in the Streets and Three in the Attic who sounds like a piece of work in Strasberg’s memoirs). Then there was The Name of the Game Is Kill! (1968) and The Brotherhood (1968).
After that though, it was pretty much episodic TV, episodic TV, and more episodic TV with the odd film like Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, playing a Pauline Kael critic who gets punched in the face for the effrontery of suggesting the main character (played by John Huston) is gay. Strasberg wrote two entertaining memoirs, popped up in movies like The Manitou (1978) and Delta Force (1986), did some theatre, looked terrific, and died far too young of breast cancer in 1999.
Susan Strasberg was a victim of overhype – her family lineage and early stage and film success led to unrealistic expectations that she would become an all time great actress rather than the extremely competent one that she actually was. Nonetheless, she livened up numerous popular movies – Picnic, Kapo, Taste of Fear, The Trip, Psych Out – and was particularly well cast in women in peril films. Strasberg had a decent career, but it could have been stronger had she picked better roles, and if she’d had a less chaotic private life: her parents both helped and harmed her, while her relationship with Jones harmed her, as did her drug taking. Furthermore, she admitted to being attracted to mediocre material “because that way I didn’t have to test myself. I could always rely on the fact that I’d be better than my material.” Her books are a fascinating read and her films worth checking out, flaws and all.
