Stephen Book

Stephen Book is an acting teacher, coach, and director 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, Kurtwood Smith, William Schallert, Grant Heslov, and stand-up comics George Carlin, Adam Ferrara, and Christopher Titus.

Stephen studied with the legendary Viola Spolin at Sarah Lawrence College. They later co-designed the Spolin Theater Game Center in Hollywood, where he served as executive director and principal teacher. He also studied with Lee Strasberg in the Directors Unit at the Actors Studio.

A former long-time faculty member of The Juilliard School and USC, he has also taught at Stanford, Brown, UCLA, the Esalen Institute, 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), The Actor Takes a Meeting, and Secret Magic Stuff for Actors.