Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Dalton.
Hi Lisa, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Today, I am one of the top master teachers in the world who specialize in Michael Chekhov’s approach to peak performance in the performing arts. As an Amazon Best Selling Author, I just launched my fourth book, Acting the Michael Chekhov Way: A Playbook for Healthy, Sequential Training. My story likely starts from bored middle-child syndrome, flunking kindergarten, and getting suspended from first grade. I did make my first official stage debut at 6, nonetheless. Any opportunity to act out and draw attention seemed to be just perfect for me, though, being bullied for my clumsiness, bright carrot-top pixie hair cut, and undiagnosed dyslexia, was surely distressing. I charged through childhood as a rough-and-tumble tomboy in denial of the gender limits imposed on “girls.”
I wrote, produced, directed, and played a supporting role in my first play at ten, when I moved away from my strict yet filled-with-performance-opportunities Florida elementary school. We wound up outside of Washington, DC, where I won MVP trophies in basketball and softball with the Catholic Youth Organization, won county Tennis tournaments, and played street football with my brothers and the neighbors. I soon learned to create my own shows, directing A Christmas Carol at eleven.
By high school, I directed the winning class play for three years straight and went off to college as a theatre major. A truly lackluster collegiate experience drove me toward the avant-garde theatre and then New York. In 1976, I launched my professional acting career at La Mama, ETC, as an original company member of the Bond Street Theatre (bondst.org). My first NY role was as Tiny Tim!
After four years of touring with Bond Street Theater, I began training in Michael Chekhov’s acting technique and I performed my first movie stunts, doubling for Tina Louise, Julie Hagerty, and Joann Pflug. In 2017, I released “Falling for the Stars: A Stunt Gal’s Tattle Tales”. This “beach and bathroom” reader is filled with short stories about the many films I worked on, such as Ghostbusters, Splash, Crocodile Dundee, Married to the Mob, Saturday Night Live, Highlander, and many others. I doubled Meryl Streep, Cher, and Madonna. Recently, I joined other cast members at the Times Square AMC for the 40th Anniversary screening of Motown’s cult hit movie, The Last Dragon, which was back on the big screen in the fall of 2025.
After a dozen years in New York, when three of my stunt colleagues died within four months, I swore off stunts and headed for Hollywood with my husband, our four motorcycles, and our golf clubs. My husband and I paid the rent performing in films, TV shows, and commercials. I opened the Michael Chekhov Studio in LA. And then I agreed to do “just one more stunt” back in the big apple. BAD IDEA! The rope slipped. I crashed into the cliff and landed with a lifetime handicap hangtag for my windshield.
Many years of physical therapy and moral support enabled me to continue my acting career. All the while, my love of teaching seemed to be the thing that kept me going. The pain disappeared in the classroom. By the 1990’s I began directing a documentary on Michael Chekhov and teaching in Europe and at festivals around the USA.
In 2005, I realized selling our Burbank home could create a retirement fund for me and my husband and would allow me to focus on teaching and writing…if we moved to a more economical location. We chose DFW since I wanted to be near a major, centrally located international airport where it was warm enough to ride our BMW motorcycles and play golf most of the year.
I also sensed my husband’s health declining and was blessed to spend my first three and a half years in Texas before he crossed the “rainbow bridge” on his motorcycle.
Widowhood has been deeply lonely, very character-building, and not a day goes by that I don’t miss him. I have been very productive with my solo life, having written four books and contributed to six others. I have traveled over much of western Europe, Nepal, Israel and Iceland, teaching and directing. My non-profit, The National Michael Chekhov Association, is now in its 33rd year of certifying teachers, actors, and directors. I serve on the DFW Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Actors Board of Directors, am a past president of the Tarrant County Live Theatre League, and cruise on my BMW GS 1250 Adventure Bike with the BMWDFW Motorcycle Club.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Along the way were many struggles. That lackluster college life was, in fact, a social disaster in the Greek system where I lived in a sorority. I didn’t escape the horrors of fraternity drugging and assault, nor the humiliation of their system-wide labeling of me as a whore. My esteem fell so badly that I endured four years of a relationship with an adoring “when-he-was-sober” frat boy, who landed me in the hospital more than once. It took decades to recover from the trauma of worrying for my life every day, and it was truly my beloved husband who taught me how to believe in myself and to feel worthy of love.
Six months before our wedding, my then-fiancé died of a massive coronary. As he began to move toward the most peaceful light he’d ever seen, he told the angel that he was coming back for me. We lived life to the fullest, every day, knowing tomorrow is promised to no one.
I had 30 more years with him before he left, as mentioned before. It was on 09-09-09.
In 2016, my little sister got Acute Myeloid Leukemia and passed in 2017. My older sister’s daughter assaulted me at the funeral, damaging my brain, balance, speech, and spine. The enduring effect continues to be a moment-to-moment strain.
My two brothers, twins, thirteen months older than I, passed in March and October of 2020, and my mom three years later.
There has been great pain, loss, and grief. I manage to thrive with deep practical applications of daily loving acts encouraged by Michael Chekhov’s uplifting and healing training.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
“I am a creative artist” is the opening line of a mantra that Michael Chekhov has his actors do daily. My destiny has been to bring this once-buried Hollywood secret out to the world, and to do so by publicly revealing the powerful spirit and love-filled foundations of the work. One hundred years ago, Chekhov was developing this work in Moscow and was renowned as the Soviet’s most honored actor. He was the nephew of the famous writer, Anton Chekhov. Michael Chekhov was himself developing a system of acting, directing, design, and script development that utilizes the imagination and movement as an essential way to contact the unified field of independently existing creative images. Today, we might call it visualization and energy management through concentration and meditation, but the Soviets declared it mysticism, marked him for arrest and death. Chekhov’s escape led to an Oscar Nomination and coaching many of our great mid-century stars like Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, James Dean, and more. They too withheld his techniques from the public, and his death in 1955 sent his work underground. In 1980, I became a part of a new wave of artists who found the book he released in 1953 and transformed my life. I studied with more direct students of Chekhov than anyone anywhere. I gained many perspectives and learned through many conversations, interviews and classes, aspects no one else knew about. And I was willing to talk about the power of the invisible when others were too afraid to do so. My efforts were in collaboration with a handful of artist/director/teachers from the UK, Berlin and the US. Today there are Chekhov Studios all over the world as a direct result of our combined efforts. Another specialty is my skill for structuring pedagogy and being able to deliver the content so that people of all ages and in all parts of life can find ways to be healthier and happier by learning the exercises and the principles.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I feel most important to my success if persistence and courage. I need the courage to continue with my beliefs of the truth, despite the waves of fear that set people against me. That persistence and courage came from the deep love of the work and how much healing came to me, how much the work helped me transform the deep trauma I experienced in college and the first few years afterward. Love is what carries me daily. I love the work and I love helping people discover practical ways to self-healing and creative expression.
Pricing:
- 72 hour intensive trainings $1375-1675
- 20 hour trainings $375-575
- annual online memberships $60.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chekhov.net and www.lisadalton.com
- Instagram: lisalovingdalton
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisalovingdalto/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-dalton-02a445b/
- Twitter: Lisa Loving Dalton @michaelchekhov
- Youtube: @LisaDaltonandMichaelChekhov
