Elizabeth Smith, a founding faculty member of Juilliard Drama and vocal coach who mentored countless celebrated performers over more than half a century, died on July 28 at her home in Kingston, N.Y. She was 91.
The cause was heart failure, her partner Jean Churchill said.
Juilliard launched its drama division in 1968. The program was one of the earliest to offer a four-year bachelor’s degree for actors in the United States. Ms. Smith was one of the inaugural class of professors. The program would become among the most prestigious for training actors, and so competitive that Ms. Smith once told The New York Times in 1997 that being at Juilliard was “such a horse race.”
Until her retirement in 2020, she would help foster the careers of Kevin Kline, Wendell Pierce, Kelsey Grammer, Dustin Hoffman, Patti LuPone, Christine Baranski and other stars.
Ms. Smith had a reputation as a tough voice coach with exacting standards, but one dedicated to her students.
The actress Laura Linney, who graduated from Juilliard in 1990, was confused when Ms. Smith stared at the floor during her entire audition.
“She wasn’t looking, she was listening,” to Ms. Linney’s voice, the actress said in an interview. “And she was listening to hear what potential the voice had.”
While some students didn’t respond well to her challenging lessons, Ms. Linney called herself “lucky because I just had a sense that she was always on my side.”
In a 1994 interview with the magazine American Theatre, Ms. Smith said that training for drama required a particular type of commitment from practitioners.
“An athlete wouldn’t even think of running in a marathon without undergoing very rigorous training, and yet certain people think nothing of playing roles without preparing,” Ms. Smith said.
Ms. Smith also indelibly shaped professional theater outside of the classroom, contributing to productions on Broadway and virtually every regional theater in the country as a voice and dialect coach. Her first Broadway play was “The National Health,” written by Peter Nichols in 1974. She would go on to work on productions as varied as 1993’s “The Who’s Tommy” and the 2018 revival of “My Fair Lady,” her last Broadway work, where she shaped the evolution of Lauren Ambrose’s cockney accent.
Colleagues noted her particular expertise with Shakespeare.
“When she coached Shakespeare, the actors ended up knowing what they were saying,” Margot Harley, the co-founder of The Acting Company and administrator of Juilliard Drama during its first 12 years, said in an interview. “Many Shakespeare people are just mouthing off and you don’t know really what they’re saying because they don’t know what they are saying. But they knew what they were saying with her.”
In the interview with American Theatre, she described the fundamentals of using dialect in performance:
Body and voice are closely related. Posture has a great deal to do with the efficiency with which you can breathe. Ideally you’re trying to rid the body of unnecessary tension, and you’re trying to make it easier for someone to use their breathing mechanism. Breath is to voice what gas is to a car. It’s the fundamental energy that makes it work.
Elizabeth Alison Smith was born on Sept. 15, 1934, in Closeburn, a village in Scotland, and spent her formative years in Somerset, England. She was the daughter of Henry Joste Smith, a physician, and Alison Evelyn McKenzie, a homemaker. Ms. Smith was once an aspiring actress who studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama after attending boarding school.
“The whole idea of auditioning terrified me,” she told American Theatre. At the urging of a voice teacher, J. Clifford Turner, Ms. Smith taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for five years before moving to the United States.
She is survived by her partner, Ms. Churchill, a professor emerita of dance at Bard College, whom she met 23 years ago, when they were both teaching on campus.
“The survivors are all the actors she taught,” Ms. Churchill said in an interview.
Teaching is where Ms. Smith found the most joy — and for decades, she helped students, quite literally, find their voice.
“I really do think about their potential in the years ahead, and I’d like them to leave here feeling they can be equally at home in Shakespeare, Shaw, David Mamet, Chris Durang, whoever,” she said in American Theatre. “I’d like them to have courage about their voices.”
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