Judith's childhood was marked by trauma. Stories became her escape, her rescue, and her rehabilitation. She read any book she could get her hands on and drafted brother, cousins, and neighborhood children into living room and backyard theatrical productions. Trauma-related PTSD rendered her ill-suited for academics, and she failed at college. So when she was 19 she moved to New York City. It was the mid-1960’s. She was restless, unclear of her purpose. By day she worked in a bank; during off-hours, she was an organizer of guerrilla theater events such as the 1968 picketing of the Miss America Pageant. It was an unlikely beginning for a course of life that led her to innovate a whole new way for directors and actors to work together.
When she moved to Berkeley, California in 1970, she started studying acting for real, with Jean Shelton. In Jean's classes, Judith found for the first time something that captured her full attention. "Attending acting class was like stepping through Alice's looking glass," says Judith. "It was a parallel universe, new and unique—my absorption in the world of theater was absolute. It became a spiritual laboratory, a way of understanding myself and the world around me. Acting was instantly my university, my therapist, my church, my family, my joy. It was the first thing I had ever cared enough about to work hard at. The icing on the cake was that Jean, my mentor and surrogate mother, told me that one day I would follow her footsteps and become a teacher myself. I sensed that soon the world of acting—and eventually teaching—would be the way I made my living. But at the same time I knew that the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment of the world of drama and comedy would always be its strongest pull."
The ‘70s were an exciting time in San Francisco: Judith became a working actor in theater, television and film alongside many talented and fiery actors and directors. As the '70s came to a close, she was drawn to Los Angeles, where she continued her acting career with roles on Hill Street Blues, Newhart, Little House on the Prairie, other episodics, MOWs, independent films, and theater. She continued studying, with Stella Adler, Jack Garfein, Jose Quintero, and Harold Clurman.
In Los Angeles, Judith, an idealist with a passion to explore emotional reality, imagination, and the world around her through acting, made a creative leap. She put a two-line ad in the LA Weekly, a free newspaper. The copy? On line one, "Acting for Non-Actors"; on line two, her phone number. She began with six students and after the first class, she felt such elation that she knew she would do anything to keep teaching. The date of that first class, March 4th, 1985, seemed prophetic, as she "marched forth" into her true and lasting vocation.
She had designed Acting for Non-Actors as a confidence-building recreational and creative outlet. Soon she expanded to classes for professional actors. Working as mentor and teacher to actors confirmed an observation she'd made as a working actor herself—that directors in film and television frequently know very little about actors or how to work with them. The challenge of improving communication between actors and directors fired her imagination and became a mission. Her unique ability to pull performances from non-actors gave her the key. In October 1988 she invented a brand-new course: Acting for Directors.
Acting for Directors was an acting class—but for directors. It was also attended by writers and other behind-the-camera film professionals. The workshop allowed participants to engage—as actors—in acting exercises and improvisations, monologues, and two-person scenes. The immediacy of the acting experience proved to be a revelation to both emerging and veteran directors, and writers too, taking them into greater intimacy with characters and story, and opening pathways to more effective storytelling. During the intensive, three-day workshop, Judith interwove exercises with demonstrations of principles, tools and techniques that were both practical and transformative.
This approach—of putting directors in the shoes of actors—was a new idea to the film community, and from the very first, the response was strong. Directors craved to know more about actors and how to deepen their communication with actors—how to inspire actors, how to push their buttons, how to collaborate while maintaining an open and positive authority. Judith said, "I think many directors are simultaneously fascinated and intimidated by actors. Actors are the tantalizing and dangerous 'other.' In my workshop, directors get a lot of information that they can't get elsewhere. They also get a safe place to walk in the actor's shoes, to access emotion, and to connect with their own creativity."
Judith’s courses began attracting established filmmakers as well as beginners: successful directors wishing to deepen their skills and renew their creative resources; screenwriters preparing to direct their own projects; editors moving into directing; directors of commercials, games, music videos, non-fiction, visual effects who were ready to cross over to narrative filmmaking—all found their way to Judith’s directing workshops.
She taught Acting for Directors for 27 years, to directors numbering in the thousands, from all continents.
In 1994 publisher Michael Wiese, who had heard about Judith's workshops, approached her to write a book about directing actors. Michael became an important person in Judith’s life, not only professionally, but emotionally and spiritually. He gave her encouragement and support to write her first book, Directing Actors, which was published in 1996. Then Michael asked Judith to write a second book, and The Film Director's Intuition was published in 2003.
Directors all over the world—as well as actors, screenwriters, and other film professionals—have come to rely on these books. Click here for a partial list of Endorsements.
By 1994 Judith had created, in addition to her signature workshop Acting for Directors, the Script Analysis & Rehearsal Techniques workshop. This was a five-day seminar in which she took the participant directors on a detailed, in-depth investigation into the subworld of a feature-length script of an as-yet-unreleased major studio project. Its subtext, its playable secrets—emotional history, as ifs, and spines; imagery, themes, emotional events and arc. It gave the directors a framework that would clarify and deepen their vision and at the same time leave them open to the actors' contributions and to the happy accidents of a creative workplace. In the final two days of the workshop, participants undertook practice rehearsals with professional actors provided by Judith, as well as performing as actors for each other. Followed by critique and demonstration from Judith, to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses and offer techniques to take the work to a new level.
Meanwhile her book Directing Actors was opening up the world for Judith. She had already traveled with the Acting for Directors workshop—to Rockport, Maine; New York City; Geneva and Zurich, Switzerland; Salt Lake City; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco. But the book brought her work to the attention of the Binger FilmLab in Amsterdam, which asked her to teach a workshop in its directing track. She taught there every year for 17 years. From there, her travels with the Acting for Directors and the Script Analysis & Rehearsal Techniques workshops expanded to cities around the world—Berlin, Cape Town, Sydney, Aukland, Milan, Dublin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Utrecht, Belgrade—and major cities of Canada: Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, St. John's.
In 2001 Judith’s Los Angeles studio moved to an extraordinary creative space—large, airy, light, with high ceilings and at the same time a feeling of intimacy and engagement. She called it Two Lights Studio, as a nod to her husband John Hoskins, who left his position in the marketing department of Disney Studios to run the studio with her.
Suddenly, everything was possible. The new space cried out for new workshops. The Actor-Director Lab—a dynamic, project-oriented workshop where directors and actors could collaborate with each other in an environment at once intense, creative, and positive. The Lab had a uniquely thrilling vibe. Directors and actors rehearsed outside of class, and presented the scenes in class. Judith asked the questions, gave feedback, solved problems, demonstrated scene-making, and found ways to take the work to another level—from both the director's and the actor's point of view. This was not just a directing class with actors in it, or an acting class with directors in it—it was an acting class and a directing class at the same time. Everyone worked hard and the level of excitement and achievement in this workshop was thrilling. And—the wrap parties at the end of each six-week Lab were legendary.
Judith had all along been teaching classes for actors. But by now, the early aughts, as her travel schedule intensified and she needed to organize her weekly acting classes into six-week segments, she created something she called The Masters Class. In a random moment during her Advanced Scene Study Class she had asked how many had read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—and only a few raised their hands. On an impulse she declared, "Okay. For the next six weeks, all the scenes will be from Waiting for Godot.” This evolved into The Masters Class, whose operating principle was: “When you master the Masters, you can do anything.” Judith asked students to expand their imaginations to allow gender-blind casting. And she asked the actors to devise, during rehearsal, their own mise-en-scene. When two scene partners brought in the opening scene of “Godot” having envisioned it as two actors in the waiting room of a casting office—and every line emerged with clarity and humanity—she knew this class would free actors’ instruments and empower their imaginations to a degree that would be life-changing for them. Over a period of 13 years, there were Masters Classes using plays or screenplays by Sam Shepard, Eugene O’Neill, Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman, the Coen Brothers, Charlie Kaufman, John Cassavetes, Martin McDonagh, John Patrick Shanley—plus LOTS of Shakespeare. One set of actors put the Romeo & Juliet balcony scene in a bar, with Juliet as the bartender and Romeo that guy who argues about leaving at closing time. Another set of scene partners did the Ghost of Hamlet’s father scene like it was a zombie movie… What crazy, invigorating fun! What a primal expression of creativity!
Some Masters Class sessions were television oriented. Judith chose pilot scripts from influential series like Mad Men, Scandal, Orphan Black, The Americans, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, Twin Peaks, Seinfeld. Soon she allowed directors into the class and it became a kind of Actor-Director Lab 2.0.
In the meanwhile, Judith devised the Directors Rehearsal Intensive. In this workshop, all the rehearsal was conducted in the class. The directors worked with actors in two-hour slots—in front of Judith and the rest of the class. This way Judith could give first-hand, detailed feedback on how the director was communicating with the actors, and whether the director’s vision for the script was being effectively articulated and brought into life. As a huge bonus, directors got to observe the other directors working with actors—an invaluable source of inspiration and new ideas. One of Judith’s students described her as “the ‘House M.D.’ of emotional life,” with the ability to discover the emotional core of scripts in any genre.
Judith's experiences in theater during the 1970s, primarily at the Berkeley Stage Company (led by Angela Paton and Robert Goldsby), had been so enriching, so liberating, so central to her confidence in herself not just as an actor but as a person, that she wanted her students to have that too. Her students had pitched in so gallently to help Judith and John build out the Two Lights space into a theater—that it felt natural to mount plays, acted and co-directed (with Judith as the other co-director) by students. (See Photo Gallery here)
Following the economic downturn of 2008, which hit Hollywood hard, Judith and John created events at the Studio that could be attended at no charge—so people could still feel that they had a family at the Studio even if they couldn’t afford classes. John procured a projector and sound system. The monthly Two Lights Short Film Festival was born! Anyone who had been a student of Judith’s could screen a short film. Afterwards there were Q&A's—the filmmakers shared their war stories. People brought beer and snacks to make it a party. Every single evening of Short Film Screenings was entertaining, inspiring, and generative of connection, fun, and ideas for new projects. (Photo Gallery here)
Right around this time something kind of amazing happened: Judith began to be contacted by alumni of her classes who were eager to share their knowledge. The more successful they were, the more expansive were their secret gifts as teachers. Judith set up Q&A’s and invited everyone, at no charge. She did her best to take notes. There was no recording of these events, because she wanted to protect the purity of the gifts that were offered by these fascinating, successful people, who were not paid for their participation. You can read the notes here from these precious events. And here’s the link to the photo galleries.
Judith and John did Shakespeare every chance they got. For years they hosted monthly Friday Shakespeare potlucks. A play was chosen and anyone who wanted to could come to Judith and John’s home, and bring a dish to share. After noshing, we’d settle into the living room and read the play out loud together, pausing to figure out difficult sections. A highlight was the summer that we took three months to read King Lear in the backyard around a fire pit. Later, at the Motor Avenue Studio, we had Shakespeare Sundays. There was never any charge for Shakespeare—the idea, always, was that Shakespeare exists to bring us joy, expansion, and relief from disconnection.
Judith always did her best to make herself available to directing students who needed to meet one-on-one in order to prepare for their projects. Since the Studio was closed in 2015, she has devoted herself to these one-on-one clients. Today she can continue to carry out her need to be of service—and, keep her brain active! She has consulted on many significant projects and is very proud of her clients—she shepherds them as though they are family. (One-on-One for Directors)
She kept writing, focused on making techniques for more revelatory performances available to any filmmaker to cares to try them. In September 2019, a lightly revised and updated version of Directing Actors was released in audiobook, read by Judith—available on Audible and other platforms.
Then, in April 2021, Directing Actors 25th Anniversary Edition was released. Judith says, "This is the best I have to offer storytellers. I've worked as hard as I can to make DA25 detailed and complete—hoping that it takes these tools and principles into the 21st century and still retains the flavor and energy of the original."
Here's what Judith has to say about the arc of her career: "I never had a business plan. I just kept having ideas." For instance, she was teaching in New York City on the weekend of September 8-10, 2001, and witnessed the September 11 Twin Towers attacks from a hotel van while in transit that morning to Newark airport. Making the commitment, in that very moment, to return in solidarity to New York to teach once a year, was natural. The 2020 pandemic became a similar call to action. Through the spring and summer she gave free Zoom Q&A workshops, to try to help all of us keep up our spirits when we all felt so separated—and so blocked, professionally and personally—by the lockdowns and restrictions. This led to her figuring out how to give Zoom workshops in script analysis and rehearsal techniques. (If your organization is interested, contact John at john@judithweston.com.)
Judith's volunteer community service activities have included the Make a Film Foundation, the Brotman Hospital Life Transition Program, the Braille Institute, and the Screen Actors Guild "Book Pals" program of reading in the schools. Certain breathtaking opportunities cemented her commitment to the curative powers of live theater. As a guest of Irene Oppenheim of the Firehouse Theater Company, Judith was invited to direct a company of physically disabled actors in scenes and monologues from roles which they were—emotionally—eminently suited for, but in which they were not likely to be cast. For instance, Jim Troesh, a working actor who was quadriplegic, got to play Val (Marlon Brando's role in the movie The Fugitive Kind). In the scene, Val utters this heartbreaking line: "You know they's a kind of bird that don't have no legs so it can't light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky? That's true."
Judith was then invited to lead acting workshops for developmentally challenged adults and stroke and head injury survivors. At one point during one of these workshops, the participants started clamoring for the chance to put on a show. She knew that remembering lines would be a challenge, but she trimmed down the book and score for West Side Story, invited non-disabled actors from her classes to join in—and a stunning, transformative 30-minute production of "West Side Stars" was presented to family and friends. The afternoon ended with the company of disabled and non-disabled actors singing "There's a Place for Us"—without a dry eye in the house.
One summer she was hired to run a creative dramatics program (Bruin Kids) at UCLA. This involved creating, directing, and coordinating, over the course of the summer, five 30-minute productions—with a new group of 8-to-10-year-olds brought in every two weeks. She divised half-hour versions of The Music Man, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Star Wars, Charlotte’s Web, and Oliver!, to present to the parents at the end of each two-week session. She was given warnings—which she did not heed—that her selections were too ambitious. But she knew the children would thrive with challenging material. And they did. On the first morning she would outline the story and ask them what they thought about the characters (e.g., for Midsummer Night's Dream, "How many of you don't believe in fairies?" About half the hands shoot up. "Okay. How many of you have proof that fairies don't exist?" No hands). She then invited them to cast themselves—and it worked out perfectly—even when five of the kids wanted to play Professor Harold Hill, or Princess Leia, she found ways to make it happen. She now says of that charmed summer, "For a theater rat like me, the chance to watch 30 children march around a stage in homemade costumes, holding pretend musical instruments and singing '76 Trombones'—is everything."
Judith knows she has benefitted from great good luck—most importantly because she found her soulmate in John Hoskins. In 2004 Judith battled a rare but treatable form of cancer. It was caught early, which was improbably good luck, but required severe management (bad luck). She had always thought of herself as the person who is supposed to take care of others, and when she was diagnosed as supremely vulnerable, she was afraid there might be no reason for her students to see her as someone to look up to and learn from. For a minute she considered trying to hide the truth from her students, but instead chose to surrender and trust them. They came through—like gangbusters. She continued teaching (at a reduced schedule) throughout chemotherapy, and this became one of the most fulfilling experiences of her life. She is not the only person to have reported the ways that cancer treatment can be clarifying and centering—but she rejects the idea that she was has survived many years of remission because “God intended her” to do so. She knows what it's like to have a brush with death. She deeply believes that early diagnosis, excellent medical care, and a hell of a lot of luck are crucial to good outcomes. At the same time she knows that anyone can be buoyed, uplifted, and propelled by a sense of purpose in their life. You—the students and clients she treasures—are the reason she is flourishing.
In the spring of 2021, she has this one central message: Eat properly, exercise, hydrate—of course. But please—please—get vaccinated for COVID-19 as soon as you are able.