Bella Merlin

Bella Merlin is an actor, writer, and actor-trainer, acclaimed internationally as a practice-as-researcher and for her work on Stanislavsky.

She appears regularly on stage and screen, including seasons at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival; her original one-woman play, Tilly No-Body: Catastrophes of Love; a number of productions for Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint, the National Theatre, Andy Lavender’s Lightwork Theatre Company, and BBC Television and Radio. Her training at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow resulted in a renegotiation of Stanislavsky’s acting principles. Her account of the training – Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training (Nick Hern Books, 2001) – is the first English-language book to detail Stanislavsky’s rehearsal practice, Active Analysis, from the actor’s perspective. She has directed a number of theatre productions exclusively using Active Analysis.

As an actor-trainer, Merlin has led workshops in Japan, France, Poland, Australia, Colombia, North America, and across the UK. She was a key contributor to Derek Paget’s ‘Acting with Facts’ project (University of Reading), and Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannacci’s ‘Performing Presence’ project (Universities of Exeter, Stamford and London). With a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, she is currently Professor of Acting and Directing at the University of California, Riverside.

Merlin has published widely, with books including Acting: The Basics (Routledge); With the Rogue’s Company: Henry IV at the National Theatre (Oberon/National Theatre); Konstantin Stanislavsky (Routledge Performance Practitioners); and the co-editing with Andrei Kirillov of Michael Chekhov’s autobiographies, The Path of the Actor (Routledge). Her work is featured in the online Routledge Performance Archive, and in 2012 she recorded an album of original songs, Scenes Through the Tenement Windows.

More details can be found at www.bellamerlin.com