Stephen Book is a director and acting teacher best known for creating Improvisation Technique: improvisational acting applied to scripted performances for film, stage, and television. In 1985 he opened the Stephen Book Acting Workshop in Hollywood, now in its 39th year.
His students have included Academy Award winners William Hurt, Rita Moreno, and Robin Williams, as well as Val Kilmer, Maura Tierney, Sanaa Lathan, Carla Gugino, Tim Matheson, Valerie Mahaffey, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, David Boreanaz, Tate Donovan, Janis Paige, Larry Drake, Kurtwood Smith, William Schallert, Grant Heslov, and stand-up comics George Carlin, Adam Ferrara, and Christopher Titus.
Stephen has coached singers for roles in film and TV including Randy Travis, Michael Hutchence (INXS), Mindy McCready, and Ozzie Osbourne. He was creative consultant to Melissa Manchester on her Grammy-nominated “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and to the director Vincent Ward on the Oscar winning film What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams.
As an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, Stephen studied with the legendary Viola Spolin. They later co-designed the Spolin Theater Game Center in Hollywood, where he served as executive director and principal teacher. He received an MFA in directing at Stanford University and studied with Lee Strasberg in the Directors Unit at the Actors Studio.
At the age of twenty-eight, he joined the faculty of The Juilliard School (1973-1981). He has also taught at Stanford, Brown, Bread Loaf School of English, USC (1977-1991), UCLA, the Esalen Institute, Circle in the Square Theater School, in London at the Globe Shakespeare Center, and in Moscow at both the Russian state theater school (GITIS) and as keynote speaker at the international conference on Modern Methods of the Actor’s Psychotechnique at the Stanislavsky Center.
He has directed productions Off Broadway and in regional and university theaters, including Washington Theater Club, Los Angeles Actors Theater, Stanford Repertory Theater, Equity Library Theater, New Dramatists, Princeton, Brown, Sarah Lawrence, USC, and the Theater of Dionysus in Athens.
His books include Book on Acting: Improvisation Technique for the Professional Actor in Film, Theater and Television (also translated and published in Poland) and The Actor Takes a Meeting.
