F. Matthias Alexander

Frederick Matthias Alexander was an Australian actor and author, born on 20 January 1869 near the present-day town of Wynyard, Tasmania, and died on 10 October 1955. He is best known for developing the Alexander technique, an educational process said to recognize and overcome reactive, habitual limitations in movement and thinking. His work grew not from a laboratory or university post, but from the practical pressures of performance, health, voice, and self-observation.

Alexander was the eldest of ten children born to John Alexander, a blacksmith, and Betsy Brown. He was born prematurely, and his mother’s determination and care were credited with his survival. They remained close throughout his life. His father was religious, hard-working, and apparently a heavy drinker, and Alexander’s bond with him was less strong. Even so, Alexander later credited his father with teaching him to be alert and observant. He grew up in an evangelical Protestant household where the Sabbath was strictly observed. Though he later described himself as an agnostic, that upbringing left him with a strong sense of right and wrong, self-discipline, and personal responsibility.

Education mattered deeply to his mother, even when it was not a priority for many local families. Alexander first attended Sunday school and then the government school, where he was precocious, sensitive, attention-seeking, and not always easy to teach. A sympathetic Scots teacher, Robert Robertson, became something of a father figure. Robertson excused him from daily attendance and taught him in the evening, giving him not only a basic education but also a lifelong love of Shakespeare, theatre, and poetry. At fifteen, Alexander became Robertson’s pupil-teacher assistant, with the aim of becoming a schoolmaster.

At sixteen, while visiting relatives in Waratah, a town serving the tin mine at Mount Bischoff, Alexander was offered a well-paying job by the mining company. He accepted it on his parents’ advice, though it disappointed Robertson. He later said his employers valued his work, and he also took on jobs as a life insurance agent and a collector of rates. In his spare time he pursued horse racing, learned the violin, and joined a local amateur dramatics society. There he played several roles and met members of touring professional companies, including Robert Young and Edith, an aspiring actress who later married Alexander.

In 1889, after three years in Waratah, Alexander moved to Melbourne seeking “a wider scope of activity” in livelihood, art, and education. He spent his first months in theatres, galleries, and concerts, then worked in clerical jobs while training as a reciter. He took lessons from figures including the English actor James Cathcart and the Australian elocutionist Fred Hill, and he was inspired by performances of Sarah Bernhardt. By 1891 newspapers were noting his amateur dramatic recitals and reviewing them positively. Yet he began to suffer hoarseness, sometimes barely able to speak after performing, and friends noticed audible gasping during his recitations.

When doctors and voice trainers did not solve the problem, Alexander began examining his own speaking habits with mirrors. In the account he later gave in The Use of the Self, this led him toward “conscious control” of action, inhibiting wrong movements rather than trying to force correct ones, and paying attention to the “means whereby” rather than only the desired end. He later said his vocal and respiratory troubles disappeared. That is why a line associated with him, “People do not decide their futures; they decide their habits, and their habits decide their futures,” fits so neatly: his work asks people to notice the small patterns that shape a life.