"[4] Because he was unable to cope with feelings of guilt relating to his brother's death, for which his parents blamed him, the young Meisner became isolated and withdrawn.

He found release in playing the family piano and eventually attended the Damrosch Institute of Music (now the Juilliard School), where he studied to become a concert pianist.

[5] When the Great Depression hit, however, his father pulled him out of music school to help with the family business in New York City's Garment District.

Meisner later recalled that his only means of enduring long days spent lugging bolts of fabric was to entertain himself by replaying, in his mind, all the classical piano pieces he had studied in music school.

Meisner believed this experience helped him develop, at age twenty, an acute sense of sound akin to perfect pitch.

This trick was only partly for effect, he explained, because it actually helped him more closely listen to his student's work and pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.

He had acted at the Lower East Side's Chrystie Street Settlement House under the direction of Lee Strasberg, who would play an important role in his development.

Meisner summered with the Group Theatre at their 1936 rehearsal headquarters at Pine Brook Country Club in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut.

In 1934, fellow company member Stella Adler returned from private study with Stanislavski in Paris and announced that Stanislavski had come to believe that, as part of a rehearsal process, delving into one's past memories as a source of emotion was only a last resort and that the actor should seek rather to develop the character's thoughts and feelings through physical action, a concentrated use of the imagination, and a belief in the "given circumstances" of the text.

At the Playhouse he developed his own form of method acting that was based on Stanislavski's system, Meisner's training with Lee Strasberg, and on Stella Adler's revelations about the uses of the imagination.

It was during these early years at The Neighborhood Playhouse that Meisner was briefly married to the young actress Peggy Meredith, who appeared in several Broadway productions.

The first class of only nine students had the privilege of being taught by theatre luminaries Martha Graham, Louis Horst, Laura Elliott, and Agnes de Mille.

Over his years of teaching at the Playhouse, this founding member of The Group Theatre developed and refined what is now known as the Meisner Technique: "To live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.

Notable students and alumni of The Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner's instruction include: Dylan McDermott, James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Diane Keaton, Jeff Goldblum, Tony Randall, Sydney Pollack, David Mamet, Connie Britton, Brian Geraghty, Leslie Moonves, Sherie Rene Scott, Chris Noth, Tucker Smallwood, Mary Steenburgen, Betsy von Furstenberg, Allison Janney, Jennifer Grey, Ashlie Atkinson, Christopher Meloni, Alex Cole Taylor,[12] and many more.

They were given a single line of dialogue, told to turn away, and instructed not to do or say anything until something happened to make them say the words (one of the fundamental principles of the Meisner technique).