Celia Adler

Celia Feinman Adler (December 6, 1889 – January 31, 1979) was an American actress, known as the "First Lady of the Yiddish Theatre".

Early life Tzirele Adler was born in New York City on December 6, 1889, to daughter of Jacob Adler and Dinah Shtettin, who were both actors in the Yiddish theater. From a young age, she was referred to as Celia. She was the half-sister of Stella Adler, Luther Adler, and Jacob Adler's five other children. Unlike Stella and Luther, who became well known for their work with the Group Theater and their film work and as theorists of the craft of acting, she was almost exclusively a stage actress. The couple had met and married in London, and they arrived in the United States from there shortly before Celia's birth. although they continued to work together in the theater.

Shtettin subsequently married the actor and playwright Sigmund Feinman, and Celia was raised by her mother and stepfather. Needing work, Shtettin continued to work with Adler's troupe and brought Celia onstage as a prop at as young as six months old. When Celia was four, she acted in The Yiddish King Lear alongside her father and step-mother, in a role playwright Jacob Gordin had written specifically for her. In 1918, she was hired by the Yiddish Art Theater, which put on as many as thirty-five plays per season and relied on actors ad-libbing their lines. Adler was typically cast as a weeping maiden or desperate mother. Adler, along with co-stars Paul Muni and Marlon Brando, refused to accept compensation above the Actor's Equity minimum wage because of her commitment to the cause of creating a Jewish State in Israel. While this play was expected to run for a month, it lasted thirty weeks. Her last film was a 1985 British documentary with archive footage, Almonds and Raisins, narrated by, among others, Orson Welles, Herschel Bernardi and Seymour Rechzeit. to actor Lazar Freed, theatrical manager Jack Cone, and businessman Nathan Forman.