It was possibly the most ominous moment in American theatre history. The actress Stella Adler, who felt she was being destroyed by what would become known as the Method, went to Paris in 1934 and met the man who had inspired it, the great Russian director and theoretician Konstantin Stanislavski. And what was his reply to her complaints, especially those about the technique known as “affective memory”, which means drawing on one's own emotional experiences so as to give life to a character? He told her that it was relatively unimportant and need never be used unless all else had failed.

But when Adler reported his words to the Method fanatic Lee Strasberg, who was to go on to found the Actors Studio and put affective memory at its very core, he shrieked: “Stanislavksi doesn't know. I know.”

Well, Adler went her own way, successfully creating the role of Bessie Berger, the matriarch at the centre of Odets's Awake and Sing. But so many American actors fell in behind the cult leader Strasberg that the Method became the dominant force in American theatre. You can still see its influence in those screen and stage performers who aspire to turn characters into their own selves - and sometimes their own mumbling, fidgeting, scratching selves - rather than turn their selves into characters. As Peter Ustinov said when he was directing a maddeningly fussy, restless, self-absorbed Method actor: “Don't just do something; stand there.”

Strasberg's revisionism is one way to spurn Stanislavski. Another has sometimes been the British way, which is to ignore him altogether and, like the late John Gielgud in his more precious moments, rely too much on voice and melody.

In both cases it's worth going back to the gospel itself, Stanislavski's book An Actor's Work, which has just been republished in a lively new translation by Jean Benedetti. In it the author, disguised as one Tortsov, instructs a student group led by Kostia, who is Stanislavski's own younger self - and how incisive and stimulating the result often is, how vital it still seems today.

Near the start Kostia presents his tutor with an Othello in which he reproduces the stealthy, dangerous, supposedly “African” tiger imitations that he has practised in the mirror. Near the end he appears disguised as a theatre critic who squeals, giggles and amazes himself and others with “my insolence, the hostility of my tone, my point-blank stare, my cynicism and rudeness”. Tortsov is withering about the first, which exemplifies the superficial, tricksy acting that he loathes, but is so convinced by the second that he pushes Kostia away in disgust, screaming “Vermin, parasite!”.

An Actor's Work shows us how and why Kostia's evolution occurred. It's actually two books trimmed and edited into one: An Actor Prepares, which Stanislavski began in 1929 and kept obsessively revising, and Building a Character, unfinished at his death in 1938. And the obvious problem - that there can be no totally authoritative text - is worsened by the fact the two volumes were published many years apart. The result was that Stanislavski's disciples, especially in America, absorbed the first, which is largely about actors' need to explore and exploit their inner selves, and neglected the second, which talks in detail of technique and the discipline required onstage.

Either way, Stanislavski looks for actors who utterly reject the hack acting he found in the Russian theatre - “tearing one's hair to suggest despair, stridency for hatred, a false sob for grief” - and end up able to perform the great dramatist he put on the map. Yes, Chekhov would probably have renounced the theatre in despair if the director hadn't taken The Seagull- a crudely performed flop at its premiere - and given it the sensitive, psychologically probing production it needed. And it's mainly from his experience with Chekhov that Stanislavksi worked out methods, as opposed to a Method, that can still transform a decent actor into a major one.

These include rigorous exercises with the voice, athletic work with the body and ruses for excising stress and tension, but also the subtler stuff often associated with a “system” that he never wanted to become rigid. Since actors can't rely on inspiration, which comes from deep within, Stanislavski aimed to stimulate it by helping them to “make the unconscious conscious”. That means drawing on one's own experiences and imagination to think and feel oneself into a character's past history, present predicament and changing motives. It means reacting truthfully and freshly “as if” one was really there. It means much else, maybe including that contentious “emotional memory”, as Stanislavksi called it.

Michael Caine once told me that for moments of grief he recalled the death of the beloved father who never saw him rise from Cockney obscurity to international success.

So emotional memory can have its successes. I don't know what went through Dustin Hoffman's mind when his Willy Loman cradled John Malkovich's Biff in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, but I do know it was one of the two or three most moving moments I've had in a theatre. And yet there are tales of the technique not only producing narcissistic, selfish performances, but of making actors neurotic, hysterical and ill.

Indeed, the same Hoffman could take Method techniques to extremes. He appeared on the set of Marathon Man looking drawn and dishevelled, having not slept for two days in order to play the victim of Laurence Olivier's fugitive Nazi. “Dear boy, you look awful,” Olivier said. “Why don't you try acting?” For the same film Hoffman notoriously forced Olivier to rush ad-libbing around Central Park in preparation for a scene in which he'd chase him with a gun, seemingly not caring when the sickly peer's ankles began to swell dangerously.

Yet I'll never forget that great Irish player, Ray McAnally, telling me that Olivier wasn't an actor but a brilliant, bravura “performer”. Perhaps he could have done with a bit of Stanislavski. Yet again the Russian has always had his critics, among them Chekhov himself, who felt he stimulated his actors with such overelaborate stage effects that he yearned to write a play beginning with total silence: “No birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, not one single cricket.” Then, as today, Stanislavksi was provocative, controversial - and, as An Actor's Work confirms, a genius.

An Actor's Work is published on February 11 by Routledge.

WHAT HAS STANISLAVSKI EVER DONE FOR US?

Chiwetel Ejiofor, starring in Othello at the Donmar Warehouse

He was just a very thorough theatre practitioner. I've read some of his books and also his notes on various plays - including, a while ago, his notes on Othello. I found it detailed and fascinating. There's been a misinterpretation of what he's intending to say about acting, that it's all about disappearing into something irretrievably. It's not about that completely. He had a real perspective on the feelings of the audience watching the show. He knew how a show should move. A lot of his stuff is enlightening and engaging but, like anything else, you formulate your own way through. You take what's useful.

Janet McTeer, starring in God of Carnage at the Gielgud from March 7

My bible when I was at college was actually Uta Hagen's book, Respect for Acting, but I always thought Stanislavski was great. The imagination is a wild and woolly thing that tends to go off on its own - it's the greatest tool an actor has. And all these methods are just tools to bring some focus, some discipline to the imagination. I've always drawn from all of them.

If you get stuck in a scene, it's great to use Stanislavski - you just remind yourself: “What do I want? How am I going to get there?” It can be very, very simple. But like any method, if you stick to it to the exclusion of all else you'll go wrong.

Samuel West, directing Dealer's Choice at Trafalgar Studios

It's not about navel-gazing. And, actually, it's not about feelings. That's a problem I have with the Method. I've seen Method actors come off stage and say: “Yeah, I'm really feeling it tonight.” And I say: “That's interesting, but did it work?”

Character is not about how you feel about your grandfather or what you had for breakfast; it's how you behave. But people behave differently because of what they have for breakfast. It does embody something, that argument between Olivier and Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man (see feature). Olivier thought that acting was representation - that it was all about show. And that won't do for us any more. I do as much homework as I can - only 10 per cent may be of any use, but the more you do, the bigger the 10 per cent. But it's not a black art. You just feel a little bit more in control. You don't need to know who gave you that ashtray on the coffee table. But it might mean that you feel a bit less of a wanker when you sit down next to it.

And we know the difference, []don't we? When you switch on the radio, within a second and a half you know if you're listening to drama. I'm not sure it should be quite so easy.

Olivia Williams, starring in Happy Now at the National Theatre

Stanislavski's way of working and the influence of his system is not something you adopt or reject, it is in the very fibre of the modern acting style. I am working in a play that meanders in and out of realism, comedy and some heightened dream sequences, and they all need to be routed by a philosophy, or you find yourself chasing laughs, or speaking faster so you can get offstage and text the nanny.

My own philosophy is to adopt the working methods of the director of each production. I worked with an astonishing Polish theatre company, Garzienice, and vowed to abandon my life and live in a forest with them performing folk tales by candlelight. I guess I am a technical tourist.

It is pure coincidence that in my present employment, Happy Now, I am living the life of my character, and her reactions are largely my own. It is Stanislavski in reverse. I keep trying to shake her off, then there she is, unable to persuade her own child to put a coat on, or stepping in dog shit in her flip flops.

When you reach a dead end with a scene, or even in life, Stanislavski's nine questions will get you out of almost any fix, be it a tragedy or a comedy or a gravy advert.

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