1. Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art
London
It was born
before feature films even were invented. But this 111-year-old British
institution has trained some of the most famous actors in cinematic history:
Vivien Leigh, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, Anthony Hopkins, Glenda Jackson,
John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Jonathan Pryce … the list goes on and on …
2. Yale School of
Drama
New Haven, Conn.
Two words: Meryl
and Streep. And if they weren't enough: Angela Bassett, Sigourney Weaver,
Frances McDormand, Patricia Clarkson, Paul Giamatti … But the star power of its
graduates isn't the only thing that makes Yale a top pick. No other school
offers as many production opportunities. Yale Rep has premiered more than 100
plays, including two Pulitzer Prize winners and four finalists, and sent 12
shows to Broadway that earned more than 40 Tony noms (and eight wins). More
recent grads (with good jobs) include: Empire's Trai Byers, Agents of SHIELD's
Brett Dalton, How to Get Away With Murder's Aja Naomi King and new film star
Marissa Neitling, who appears opposite Dwayne Johnson (who didn't go to Yale)
in San Andreas.
3. Carnegie
Mellon
Pittsburgh
The oldest drama
school in America is better known for its undergraduates — churning out winners
like Ted Danson, James Cromwell, Rob Marshall, Steven Bochco, Ming-Na Wen,
Holly Hunter, Zachary Quinto and Matt Bomer (who picked up a Golden Globe this
year for his turn in HBO's The Normal Heart). But its graduate program is
gaining traction.
4. UC San Diego
San Diego
A partnership
with the Tony-winning La Jolla Playhouse means that everybody who gets in ends
up with a job: MFA students are assured at least one professional residency at
the theater.
5. Old Globe,
University of San Diego
San Diego
Only 2 percent of
applicants are accepted into this demanding two-year program — that's just
seven new students per year. The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons got his MFA
there in 2001; now he's got four Emmys, a Golden Globe and a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame.
6. Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama
London
Here's where
Carrie Fisher learned how to speak like Princess Leia (with a "British
accent that ebbs and flows like menstrual bloat" was how she once
described it). Other grads who went on to make something of themselves include
Laurence Olivier, Julie Christie, Kathleen Turner, Vanessa Redgrave and — more
recently — Game of Thrones' Kit Harington, The Amazing Spider-Man's Andrew
Garfield and The Hobbit's Martin Freeman. "Central stands at the heart of
training and research for our great British theater," says yet another
grand alum, Judi Dench.
7. UCLA
Los Angeles
The school's
film, theater and television programs are all under one roof — and often
collaborate — which makes this campus, smack in the middle of the entertainment
capital of the world, a smart choice for learning about showbiz. Grads: Richard
Lewis, Eric Roth, Corbin Bernsen and Francis Ford Coppola.
8. UC Irvine
Irvine, Calif.
Located on a
former buffalo ranch, this small, long-established program accepts only eight
actors a year — four men, four women. Empire's Grace Gealey was among the lucky
few; she got her MFA in acting here in 2010.
'Empire’s' Grace
Gealey, who got her MFA from UC Irvine in 2010.
9. USC School of
Dramatic Arts
Los Angeles
USC is better
known for its film school (see THR's 2015 Top 25 Film Schools list, coming in
July) than its drama program. But plenty of success stories have had their
start here, including Jay Roach, Shonda Rhimes and Stephen Sommers. And a new
partnership with the Shanghai Theatre Academy in China has opened doors, as the
Summer Institute for International Actors organizes student exchanges across
the Pacific.
10. Brown
Providence, R.I.
A partnership
with the Tony-winning Trinity Rep (home to nearly 60 world premieres) is a huge
plus for this Ivy League postgraduate program. Undergrad alums who've made
their way to Hollywood include The Office's John Krasinski and Modern Family's
Julie Bowen. But the graduate program has produced such theater luminaries as
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes.
Ed Harris, who
graduated from CalArts in 1975.
11. Rutgers
New Brunswick,
N.J.
Partnerships with
a renowned regional theater (the George Street Playhouse) and a
much-farther-flung venue (Shakespeare's Globe in London) make this program a
unique experience. MFA recipient Moritz von Stuelpnagel — class of 2014 — is a
Tony frontrunner for best direction of a play for the hit Hand to God.
Calista Flockhart
at Rutgers in pre-'Ally McBeal' days.
12. A.R.T. at
Harvard
Cambridge, Mass.
The American
Repertory Theater — a huge deal on the national theater scene, with 17 Tonys
(including one a year since 2012), 12 Drama Desk Awards, a Pulitzer and a
Grammy — allows 23 students a year into its two-year program in Cambridge. Then
it ships a bunch of them to Russia for several months of training at the Moscow
Art Theatre School.
Steve Zahn
(right) in the American Repertory Theater production of The Miser in 1989.
13. CalArts
Valencia, Calif.
The 8-to-1
student-teacher ratio at this campus outside Los Angeles — founded in 1970 by
no less an entertainment educator than Walt Disney — makes it easy to find a
mentor. Graduates include Ed Harris, Don Cheadle and Alison Brie.
Don Cheadle,
class of ’86, during his school days at Cal Arts.
14. Circle in the
Square
New York City
"Circle,"
as it's known to students, is the only accredited training conservatory
associated with a Broadway theater. If there's a school style, look for it in
alums Felicity Huffman, Kevin Bacon, Idina Menzel, Benicio Del Toro and Lady
Gaga. "Two things I learned while at Circle: that theater matters and that
acting is an art form as great as any other," alum Philip Seymour Hoffman
once said of the school.
15. University of
Delaware
Newark, Del.
Many schools
ruthlessly prune their students, culling the ranks from semester to semester.
It's Survivor, with every performer fending for himself. At Delaware, though,
the class is taught to be a troupe, a unit. That philosophy — developed by
artistic director Sanford Robbins — seems to get results. Over the past 16
years, 94 percent of students seeking summer acting employment have managed to
get it.
16. Actors Studio
Drama School at Pace University
New York City
Method acting was
invented here; it's where Brando, Pacino and De Niro all learned to mumble.
Students of the only MFA program sanctioned by the Actors Studio carry on the
Stanislavski tradition, which makes this school, in the words of alum Bradley
Cooper, "a sacred place."
17. Columbia
New York City
"A brain
trust for the American theater" is how the school's chair, Christian
Parker, describes his program. And with guest lecturers like Cate Blanchett,
Edward Albee, Alec Baldwin and Stephen Sondheim, he's not entirely wrong.
18. Boston
University
Boston
BU's College of
Fine Arts is housed in a Beaux Arts building festooned with gargoyles shaped
like mechanics — it used to be a Buick dealership. But never mind. Inside is
the MFA program in playwriting founded by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott that
accepts only four or five candidates every year. The directing MFA accepts only
one or two. But there are no acting MFAs; instead, BU's undergrad acting
students get a postgraduate internship in L.A. (with the likes of CBS
Entertainment chairman Nina Tassler or Seinfeld's Jason Alexander).
19. Bristol Old
Vic
Bristol, U.K.
The Old Vic is
aptly named: The 250-year-old stage is the U.K.'s most ancient continuously
working theater. But it's still pretty spry, sending a risky hit like Jane Eyre
to the National Theatre last year. The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School — founded
by Laurence Olivier in 1946 — is mainly an undergraduate program but accepts up
to 14 MA students a year. Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons, Miranda Richardson,
Patrick Stewart, Mark Strong, Olivia Williams and Lydia Leonard (who just got a
Tony nomination for Wolf Hall Parts One & Two) got their starts here.
20. National
Institute of Dramatic Art
Kensington,
Australia
Springboarding
off the success of its long-admired undergraduate program — which trained Mel
Gibson, Baz Luhrmann, Cate Blanchett, Judy Davis and virtually every other
Australian actor or director you've ever heard of — NIDA launched MFA programs
for writing and directing in 2014. Its first group of graduate students
recently finished the 15-month course in May.
21. DePaul
Chicago
The 6-to-1
student-teacher ratio makes this small program one of the more intimate
acting-school experiences. But it attracts plenty of jumbo-sized speakers.
Master classes have been taught by F. Murray Abraham and Faye Dunaway, and
there have been lectures by David Mamet, Julie Harris, Jonathan Pryce, John
Malkovich and Gary Sinise. Recent alums include Stana Katic (Castle) and W.
Earl Brown (Deadwood).
22. The William
Esper Studio
New York City
Esper worked for
17 years with Sanford Meisner — the guy who trained James Caan and Robert
Duvall — and taught the repetition-based technique to Jeff Goldblum, Amy
Schumer and Sam Rockwell. Grad Timothy Olyphant calls the school
"inspiring and invaluable."
23. University of
Washington
Seattle
Graduates (like Rainn Wilson, Joel McHale
and Jean Smart) tend to get work; about 50 percent of students land gigs within
12 months of graduating. It took alum Kyle MacLachlan much less time, though.
His phone started ringing the minute he picked up his diploma. One of the
callers was Dino De Laurentiis, offering MacLachlan a star-making role in Dune.
MacLachlan initially thought it was a crank call.
24. Juilliard
New York City
Its acting
program works hand in glove with its writing program, which churns out plenty
of heavyweights of its own (including Pulitzer winner David Auburn). Last year,
the ink was barely dry on Alex Sharp's diploma when he landed the lead in the
Broadway production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Other
famous grads — or in Kevin Spacey and Kelsey Grammer's cases, near-grads (they
left after two years) — include Viola Davis, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain.
25. Tisch School
of the Arts, NYU
New York City
This program
"produces fearless actors" (according to chair Mark Wing-Davey) using
an avant-garde curriculum mixing classical dramatic training with more esoteric
studies — like, um, neuroscience. "We ask how we can avail ourselves of
new tools and understandings," explains Davey. Grads include Michael C. Hall,
Peter Krause and Marcia Gay Harden.
