San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Acting coach shaped careers of greats
“She had such a passion for acting, and somehow she transferred that to me.”
Danny Glover
Just about every aspiring actor who made it in the Bay Area had to face the terror of the Jean Shelton Acting School, where the namesake owner sat behind her desk at the end of a long hallway, with a can of Tab soda and a pack of Parliament cigarettes.
She’d say “sit down, darling,” disarming the prospective student with the Southern charm that won her the Miss Georgia Peach Tree contest in her youth — until the topic turned to acting. Then she would explain the process of self-discovery, focus and discipline that the prospective student was about to endure.
“Literally in one minute the myth that a student’s star quality would carry them would disappear, and a lifetime journey of hard work would be made clear ” said her son, Chris Phillips, “They’d get it right away that this was not a game.” Those who were brave enough to stick with it were subject to four hours of instruction per class, with no completion date or graduation. Students stayed and studied and improved and returned even after they’d made it onto the stage or screen, as did Danny Glover.
“She had such a passion for acting, and somehow she transferred that to me,” Glover said. “She always said ‘protect your gift.’ Whenever people speak about acting teachers, her name is on my lips.”
The Jean Shelton Acting School, which started in a church basement in Berkeley and ended up in a studio on Union Square in San Francisco, has lasted for more than 50 years under different names. Shelton taught into her 80s, when she started experiencing dementia and had to retire. She died March 15 at a memory care facility in Oakland, her son said. She was 94.
Until her memory loss was precipitous, Shelton could recite long speeches from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a play that had such an impact on her when she saw it in Atlanta in 1947 that she left her husband and caught a train to New York, never to return. She was 19 and enrolled in the method acting classes that she later introduced to San Francisco.
Her acting class became so influential that a character named “Jean Shelton” was portrayed by Melanie Griffith teaching an acting class in San Francisco in James Franco’s 2017 film “The Disaster Artist.”
“Jean changed the lives of so many people, including me,” said Jean Schiffman, who studied under Shelton and became an actor and co-founder of the One Act Theatre Company, which lasted for 10 years on San Francisco’s Mason Street.
“She came in at a time when there were few acting teachers in the Bay Area. Then word went around that there was this wonderful acting teacher from New York. She lived up to the hype. From the minute I walked into her class, I learned what acting was all about,” Schiffman said.
Also among Shelton’s students was her daughter, screen actress Wendy Phillips, now a professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinema, where she teaches a course called Directing Actors for the Cinema.
“My mother’s brilliance is that she distilled the heady aspect of method acting to a doable form so that the scared newbie who came down the hall and up the stairs would find themselves acting within a few short weeks,” Wendy said.
Mary Virginia Shelton was born Feb. 13, 1928, in Charlotte, N.C. She grew up in Asheville, where her father was a newspaperman and her mother a secretary. The driving influence for “Jean,” as she was always known, was her maternal grandfather, Frederick Alton Abbott, who owned a small chain of movie theaters.
Silent film star Rudolph Valentino had once come to visit the Sheltons at home and signed a photo that hung in the drawing room for inspiration. Jean was enrolled in tap dance and singing classes as a child, and for the premiere of “Gone with the Wind” in 1939, she was selected to play the role of an antebellum damsel and got her picture taken with Clark Gable.
At age 10, she answered a traveling casting call for “The Little Rascals” TV show, dancing a tap to “Shoo Fly,” She didn’t make the cast and missed her chance to move to Hollywood. After her parents divorced, she was sent to live with her paternal grandparents in Atlanta.
She later enrolled at Georgia State University, where she took up baton twirling and performed with the marching band at football games. She dropped out to get married, and when that didn’t stick, she took a small inheritance from her father and fled to New York. Her break came when she was cast as the lead in an offBroadway staging of “Hello From Bertha” by her hero Tennessee Williams, who often sat in on rehearsals. The director was Broadway actor Wendell Phillips, who was impressed with her work. They were married in 1951 and amiably divorced in 1961, after she fell for another actor, Robert Elross, who became her third husband as soon as her divorce from Phillips was finalized.
Elross had been part of the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, and that’s what brought them west, with her daughter
and two sons, all under age 10. They rented a third-floor flat at Haight and Masonic streets, and soon enough Shelton was raising five kids while working full time as a legal secretary at a downtown law firm.
“She’d come home after work, feed the kids, and then do plays at the Bread and Wine Mission, a theater in a church with pews on Telegraph Hill,” Wendy Phillips said. “They also did theater in the farm fields of Yuba City and on a flatbed truck in Chico.”
In 1968, Shelton and Elross were cast opposite each other in an adaptation of “The Deer Park” by Norman Mailer at the newly opened Berkeley Repertory Theatre. That break led to a breakup of her marriage during the run of the play.
Shelton moved with her five kids to a railroad flat on Blake Street in Berkeley. To help her out, the director of Berkeley Rep asked Shelton whether she wanted to teach an acting class on Sunday mornings when the theater was dark. She started with 12 students each paying $5 a class.
Her daughter can still recite her mantra: “Why are you here? What are you doing? What do you want? Then show us.”
“She taught her own version of method acting, which I was intimidated by,” Schiffman said. “It was such a popular class that even when class was full, people would come to watch. It was amazing the way Jean would work with actors on their scenes.”
Eventually, Shelton employed both of her ex-husbands, Phillips and Elross, as instructors at her school.
“She was friends with everybody,” Schiffman said. “After class we all went to Juan’s place, this little Mexican restaurant, and talked about acting. Jean was always part of the crowd.”
According to her daughter, Shelton was always happiest around actors. She often attributed it to being an only child, which she made up for by raising five kids, mostly as a single mom.
“She always told me how lonely she was as a child, which was a reason she loved being around theater people,” Phillips said. “She loved her actors and they knew that she loved them, and that’s what made her successful.”
A public memorial is pending. Shelton’s ashes will be returned to Asheville.
She was predeceased by her ex-husbands, Wendell Phillips and Robert Elross. Survivors include her daughters, Wendy Phillips of West Los Angeles and Katherine Ross of Napa; sons, Robert Phillips of Austin, Texas, Chris Phillips of Benicia and Matt Shelton Ross of Medford, Ore.; and half sister, Sharon Horne of Washington, D.C.