About F.M. Alexander

The Alexander Technique was developed by a young actor seeking to overcome the chronic hoarseness that threatened his promising stage career.

Fredrick Mathias Alexander (1869 – 1955) was born prematurely in one of the remotest corners of the world to a family of blacksmiths and horse breeders in Tasmania, Australia. He inherited a life long passion for horses from them and an independent ‘outback’ resourcefulness. His education was scrappy due to frequent illness and breathing difficulties, but his village school teacher inspired in him a love of Shakespeare.

FM (as he became known) loved amateur dramatics and was an enthusiastic performer of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and monologues of Australian outback life. Early on, he gave up his first vocation as an accountant to form his own touring Shakespeare Theatre Company, which took him to successful engagements in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland.

His career was nearly cut short when he began to experience incidents of voice loss during recitals. Unable to find help for his condition with doctors and voice specialists, Alexander began to examine his own physical actions, suspecting that something he was doing while performing was causing the hoarseness. He spent months in front of an arrangement of mirrors, observing himself at rest, talking and reciting. His observations led him to discover the key relationship between the head, neck and back that influence posture, breath and movement. He named this relationship the “primary control” and developed a practical technique which enabled him to overcome his voice failure, as well as the breathing and digestive difficulties that had plagued him since childhood. His successful return to the stage encouraged actors and people with health problems to seek his help. 

Alexander found that the best way to teach others what he had discovered was by using his hands to guide them to a new experience of balance and coordination. In 1904 he moved to London to set up a private teaching practice, and a school for children. In 1931 he started his first teacher training course. He also taught in New York and published four books during his lifetime: Man’s Supreme Inheritance (1910), Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923), The Use of the Self (1932) and The Universal Constant in Living (1942). These books are available from Mouritz , a publisher specializing in books on the Alexander Technique, or from the American Society for the Alexander Technique.

Amongst his students were John Dewy, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Leonard Woolf and Lady Clementine Churchill. In 1987, the Australian Bicentennial Authority recognized Alexander’s achievements and included him on their list of the “200 people who made Australia great”.