professional name of Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev (1863–1938), Russian actor, director, and author; proponent of a technique for preparing a role that has had vast influence on contemporary acting.

Stanislavski was born in Moscow on Jan. 17, 1863, and began his acting career with an amateur group at the age of 15. In 1898 Stanislavski and the dramatist Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (1859–1943) founded the Moscow Art Theater, with which Stanislavski worked for the rest of his life. He acted, directed, and taught his system of acting, which had its greatest success with the plays of Maksim Gorki and Anton Chekhov. Stanislavski described his theory in the autobiographical work My Life in Art (1924) and in An Actor Prepares (1935). His complete works in Russian, all published after his death, fill eight volumes.

In 1922–24 the Moscow Art Theater toured for the first time. Audiences in Europe and the U.S. were exposed to the results of Stanislavski's teaching, which sought to convey a new emotional reality within conventional theatrical forms. During the 1930s and '40s what came to be known as “the Method” became the most prevalent theory of acting, as teachers and directors adopted and adapted Stanislavski's principles. This was particularly true in the U.S., where first the Group Theater and later the Actors Studio led in promoting a kind of theater in which individual performances were submerged in the ensemble. Employing such techniques as the mental recall of past experiences, actors using “the Method” try to re-create at every performance the sequence of truthful emotions required to convey the playwright's intent to the audience. Stanislavski died in Moscow, Aug. 7, 1938.