English-language debut on Broadway in 1922 as the Butterfly in The World We Live In, and she spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922–23, the renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only U.S. tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler and many others saw these performances, which had a powerful and lasting impact on her career and the 20th-century American theatre. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925; there, she was introduced to Stanislavski's theories, from founders and Russian actor-teachers and former members of the Moscow Art Theater—Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1931, with Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan, among others, she joined the Group Theatre, New York, founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, through theater director and critic, Clurman, whom she later married in 1943. With Group Theatre, she worked in plays such as Success Story by John Howard Lawson, two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, and directed the touring company of Odets's Golden Boy and More to Give to People. Members of Group Theatre were leading interpreters of the method acting technique based on the work and writings of Stanislavski. In 1934, Adler went to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. During this period, she learned that Stanislavski had revised his theories, emphasizing that the actor should create by imagination rather than memory. Upon her return, she broke away from Strasberg on the fundamental aspects of method acting. In 1982, the day Strasberg died, Adler is said to have remarked, "It will take the theatre decades to recover from the damage that Lee Strasberg inflicted on American actors." In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood. There, she acted in films for six years under the name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theater until it dissolved in 1941. Eventually, she returned to New York to act, direct, and teach, the latter first at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, New York City, before founding Stella Adler Conservatory of Theatre in 1949. In the following years, she taught Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Dolores del Río, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Manu Tupou, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich, and Warren Beatty, among others, the principles of characterization and script analysis. She also taught at the New School, and the Yale School of Drama.