Biography

Don Richardson was a director and teacher of actors for over fifty years. His credits include three Broadway productions and numerous prime-time television shows, among them winners of the Emmy and Peabody awards. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Broadcasting and the Jewish Museum in New York. In California he is represented in the UCLA film and television archives. He taught actors at Barnard College, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and California, and Tel Aviv University in Israel, and had a workshop of his own. During his retirement from television he taught actors and directors at UCLA Arts Extension four semesters per year until his death. His classes sold out weeks in advance. Among some of his former students were Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Montgomery, Lois Nettleton, John Cassavetes, Zero Mostel, Don Adams and a host of others. Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American Theatre forwarded his 1988 book on acting, Acting Without Agony, an Alternative to the Method, published by Allyn and Bacon, Inc.
- IMDb mini biography by: William Winckler

An old friend of directors Justus Addiss and Ezra Stone.

He was one of the original faculty in the newly established Film and Television Department at Tel Aviv University, 1972.

At the age of eighteen, he had graduated as a scholarship student from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and he personally knew the originators of the Method in America, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis, Susan Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Luther Adler, etc.

I don't believe in the Stanislavsky "Method." I also don't believe you have to become a drunk to play one, or shoot yourself up to play a drug addict, or turn a trick to portray a prostitute. You don't even have to go out and kill someone to play a murderer. I believe that acting is a work of the imagination. I also believe in simplicity and abhor complexity. All good art is simple.