According to Krampner, Stanley received nothing but raves from the critics for everything she did on stage. Her personal life was messy and she liked it that way—it seems clear that she created pain and chaos in order to channel it into her performances. In a revealing quote, Anne Jackson says, "Unless she went into a frenzy of emotion, she didn't think she was giving it her all.

" Because of the nerve-scraping way she worked, Stanley missed many performances and she could only tolerate short runs, leaving successful plays when the strain got to be too much for her. She did an unusually long run in Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet , where she shared the stage with an abusive Eric Portman and an above-it-all Helen Hayes. After Stanley's departure, old pro Hayes reflected, "Kim would have tried the patience of a saint with her striving for an opening-night level of performance—even on rainy Thursdays.

" In 1961, when she played a patient of Freud himself in , Stanley was flaming out pretty spectacularly. In order to do a primal scream at the end of Act II, she used her brother's death for a while to get the effect she wanted. Several firsthand witnesses testify in the book to this moment's unnerving power—whether it seemed specific to the character she was playing is another matter.

What isn't up for debate is that such Strasberg methods began to destroy Stanley, and that her drinking, which was always heavy, began to take over her life. By the time of Strasberg's production of , Stanley had put on considerable weight, and this reflected her plunge into complete indulgence. In a tape of the production, Stanley gives a nightmarishly pre-occupied performance, playing Masha as if she were a lunatic.

Unmoved by the great playwright's words, she often improvised some of her own. Kevin McCarthy, who played Vershinin, picked up Stanley's script one day and saw that for every one of his lines, she had struck out "Vershinin" and written "Father." This substitution makes no sense for the character, but it made perfect sense for Stanley, who spent a lifetime in loathing resentment of her daddy, a man who paid no attention to her.

Opening under poor circumstances in London, Stanley and the Actor's Studio company were brutally booed. This was a sort of last straw, and Stanley disappeared. Krampner details Stanley's lost years as thoroughly as he can.

Though there are gaps, what he reveals is queasy, dark, and, needless to say, dramatic. Diving into the kind of alcoholic binges that last for weeks, she virtually stopped working. When she got a chance to come back for Tony Richardson's 1973 film of Edward Albee's , at the first read-through Stanley did a wild improvisation on the text of the play, crawling around the floor, crying, "expressing her emotions, her flesh, her bulk," Richardson reported.

He said it was "almost obscene," but that it had "the ugliness, the truth, the understanding of great art." The film's lead, Katharine Hepburn, another old pro, was not at all amused by Stanley's exhibition, and she had her fired. Flat broke, Stanley was forced to seek work as an acting teacher in New Mexico, and was reduced to directing her biggest stage triumph, , for students.

Later she moved to New York for a time and gave legendary acting classes that started at 7pm and sometimes lasted until dawn. Such marathon sessions would alternate with weeks of dedicated boozing. One day, two students saw her struggling with groceries on the street and ran to help her.

She didn't recognize them, but turned to one and said mysteriously, "You—I kill. And I don't kill many." Then she went upstairs to drink, a once important actress playing out an extended psychodrama to the four walls of her filthy, bare apartment in Soho.

With one student, she played imaginary poker. Krampner is funny and insightful about Stanley's idiosyncrasies, and he never excuses her bad behavior, but stops short of naming a reason for her downfall, even though the reason seems obvious. Many of her friends report that Stanley couldn't tell the difference, finally, between off stage and on.

Anyone who has utilized substitutions and affective memory knows that they can have a devastating effect on a performer, especially if they're using traumas on stage night after night, as Stanley did. Most acting coaches advise their students to only use substitutions as a last resort, and then but carefully and briefly. Stanley made a whole career out of them and they ruined her life.

If you want to put a name to the "demons" Krampner constantly refers to, why not call a spade a spade and say that Stanley's chief demon was named Lee Strasberg? He did her more harm in the end than her father or any other scapegoat at hand. The really fascinating thing to be learned about Stanley from Krampner's book is that she continued to exercise her art after her breakdown, but in isolation.

In the late seventies, she told an inquisitive reporter that she was still "working quietly—from within." Though Stanley is often compared to Brando, the real point of comparison would seem to be Charles Laughton, another tormented actor who viewed acting as an art much like writing or painting. It's hard not to think that Stanley continued to perform, even if her performance was generally "great actress fallen on hard times," and that she didn't feel she needed an audience.

If those walls in Soho could talk, we might have an actresses' equivalent of According to Krampner, Stanley received nothing but raves from the critics for everything she did on stage.