Milton Katselas, 75, renowned acting teacher and director

LOS ANGELES - Milton Katselas, a prominent acting teacher and director whose students included George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Pfeiffer, and hundreds of others, has died. He was 75.

Mr. Katselas, who founded the Beverly Hills Playhouse acting school in 1978, died of heart failure Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Allen Barton, executive director of the playhouse.

For decades, Emmy-winning actress Doris Roberts studied with Mr. Katselas and was a regular at his weekly master class.

"I am the actress I am because of him. I am the human being I am because of him," Roberts told the Los Angeles Times. "He was an original, extraordinary."

"I learned something new every Saturday, even when I was working on 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' " she said. "He had such insights into people. He was so capable of finding the kernel in you that was stopping you from succeeding."

In an interview last year on "Inside the Actors Studio," Pfeiffer said he taught actors to "second-guess your first superficial choice" in how a role should be played, which "prepares actors so you are a little director-proof . . . because you learn to be your own director."

Included in the list of actors he taught are: Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, Kate Hudson, Kim Cattrall, Chris Noth, Tyne Daly, Jenna Elfman, Robert Urich, Patrick Swayze, Tom Selleck, and Tony Danza.

He was 24 when he started to teach acting in New York after observing a class that failed to impress.

"When I teach, my job is to bring out whatever is possible," Mr. Katselas said in 1998 in Buzz magazine. "It's not my job to push the ejector seat on somebody's dreams."

Milton George Katselas was born in Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh, Mr. Katselas studied theater at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. After graduating in the 1950s, he went to New York, "scared stiff" about breaking into theater, he later said, and studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

Mr. Katselas began his directing career in the 1960s with the American premiere of the Broadway play "The Zoo Story," by Edward Albee. On Broadway, Mr. Katselas also directed "The Rose Tattoo" in 1966 and "Camino Real" in 1970.

In 1970, Mr. Katselas was nominated for a Tony Award for directing the Broadway debut of "Butterflies Are Free" and came to Hollywood to direct the 1972 film version. He stayed.

He returned East in 1983 to direct "Private Lives" with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but left the show before it reached New York.

Twice-divorced, Mr. Katselas leaves two brothers, Tasso and Chris, and a sister, Sophia.