About Carole

Carole is admired internationally for her insight, devotion, and her capacity to set her students’ creative energies free. A muse for aspiring actors, she is known as Montreal’s “Acting Guru.”

Carole trained as an actor, and studied at The Neighborhood Playhouse, and with Uta Hagen at HB Studios, both in New York City. She has taken inspiration from the improvisational exercises of Viola Spolin and the work of Stella Adler. Carole has performed in numerous off-Broadway productions, as both an actor and a singer, and in regional theatre in the U.S. and Canada.

She has a doctorate from New York University in Cinema Studies, and taught Film Studies at The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) for over 3 decades. She is the first university professor in Canada to design a course specifically devoted to film acting.

Publications

Carole is the author of eight  books, including Don’t Think: Be. 20 Actors Talk About Training, Technique and Process (Amazon, 2019,) Figures of Light (Plenum, 1995,) interviews with American film actors and directors and In the Company of Actors (A & C Black, 1999,) and Conversations with Actors on Film, Television and Stage Performance, two collections of interviews with well-known British and Irish actors. In the Company was extracted in The Sunday London Times.

Her other books include: The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival, and most recently, Interviews: Neil Jordan. Carole has lectured widely on performance in the US, Canada, and various locations in Europe. She has written essays for many of the major film journals in the US and Canada.

Arts grants and fellowships

Carole’s research has been supported since 1990 by multi-year arts awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council, Canada (SSHRC.) Her specialties include film acting; script analysis and New German Cinema. In 2013 she was awarded a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities for her latest project, to examine the archival holdings (at the University of Texas, Austin) of the great American acting teacher, Stella Adler.

Other experience

Zucker was also a member of a country rock band, and written feature-length screenplays and creative fiction. Carole has studied Shakespearean theatre, Movement, Singing, Script Writing, Playwrighting, Mindfulness and Meditation, which she uses in her acting workshops, and studied with the well-known vocalization teacher, Arthur Lessac, as well as other voice teachers.

Teaching

Apart from two decades as Creative Director of Acting Workshops by Carole Zucker

Carole has taught workshops at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and The Off Center for Dramatic Arts in Burlington, Vermont. Zucker taught Scene Study and the Meisner Technique in Montreal for over 20 years, and now makes her home in Montreal, QC. She has thus far taught at The Portland Actors Conservatory and at The Portland Playhouse. Additionally, Carole has taught Intensive Meisner Technique, Script Interpretation and Text Analysis, and does private coaching of scenes and audition pieces.