Celia Adler

Celia Adler
The young Celia Adler
Born	Celia Feinman Adler (1889-12-06)December 6, 1889 New York, New York, U.S.
Died	January 31, 1979(1979-01-31) (aged 89) Bronx, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Mount Hebron Cemetery Yiddish Theatre Section
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1937–1961
Spouse(s)	Lazar Freed Jack Cone Nathan Forman

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

She was born in New York City, as Tzirele Adler (soon after known as Celia), the daughter of Jacob Adler and Dinah Shtettin, who were both actors in the Yiddish theater. 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, their film work and as theorists of the craft of acting, she was almost exclusively a stage actress.

Celia's mother, Dinah Shtettin, was the second wife of Jacob Adler. The couple had met and married in London, and they arrived in the United States from there shortly before Celia's birth. They divorced when Celia was a young child, although they continued to work together in the theater. Stettin subsequently married the actor and playwright Sigmund Feinmann. Celia used her stepfather's last name when she was growing up but later changed her name to "Adler" for her stage career.

After playing many child roles in the Yiddish theater, Adler distanced herself from the theater for a time during her teenage years, but then resumed her acting career with the encouragement of the actress Bertha Kalisch, with whom she co-starred in a production of Hermann Sudermann's play Heimat. She was associated with the Yiddish Art Theater movement of the 1920s and 1930s. She also gave one of the first theatrical portrayals of a Holocaust survivor, in Luther Adler's 1946 Broadway production of A Flag Is Born (written by Ben Hecht and featuring a 22-year-old Marlon Brando, Stella Adler's prize pupil in method acting). 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.