[1] Arriving in Moscow, Heflin worked as a Reggisseur Practicant at the Meyerhold and Vahktangov theatres, and helped workers on a collective farm produce And Quiet Flows the Don, an opera.
[1] She also worked with an English-speaking cast to stage a production of the Clifford Odets drama Waiting For Lefty on a truck-bed in the streets of Moscow, where perhaps the only words understood by the Russians who gathered to watch were, "Strike!
[1] While working in Europe, Julia became an interviewer and freelance European/Soviet feature correspondent for Stage Magazine and the old New York Herald Tribune, first abroad, and later when she returned to the United States.
[1] Just before the start of World War II, Heflin returned to New York and began teaching acting classes in the evenings at the Laboratory Theatre in Manhattan with Lee Strasberg.
Her interviews with such theatrical luminaries and popular cultural icons as Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dalí, Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, John Huston, Gene Kelly, Sinclair Lewis and Walt Disney provided her with primary source materials that shaped her subsequent work on the stage and in the classroom.
Relegating theatre and other communications training to chance encounters with well-intentioned, sometimes underpaid or untrained guides, or chopping them from the curricula, violates academic principles in all areas.