Milton Katselas, a stage and movie director most famous as an acting teacher whose hundreds of students included George Clooney, Alec Baldwin and Michelle Pfeiffer, died Oct. 24 in Los Angeles. The Pittsburgh native died of heart failure. He was 75.

Even with him living on the West Coast, the family stayed close, said his brother, Pittsburgh architect Tasso Katselas.

"We had a practice of speaking every week, and we spoke Greek, so as not to lose our language. If you forgot [and lapsed into English], you had to pay 25 cents," he said.

Milton George Katselas was born Feb. 22, 1933, in East Pittsburgh to parents who had emigrated from Greece as teenagers. He grew up in the shadows of the huge Westinghouse Electric plant, whose workers filled the 14 stools of his family's small White Front Restaurant.

His parents also bought a movie house, the old Frederick Theater on Linden Avenue, "with a pool hall under it," as Mr. Katselas told The New York Times in 1985. "That's where I started my studies in human psychology -- I did some hustling there."

"We were all pretty good pool sharks," said Tasso Katselas, speaking also of their third brother, Chris Katselas, a geologist living in Denver. "[Milton] was a dynamo and a big sports fan. We played every conceivable kind of sports and were very competitive."

The oldest of the four siblings is their sister, Sophia Katsefanas, who lives in Shadyside.

"He was very gentle, very kind, he adored our parents," she remembered. But also, "he was a man who wanted to achieve."

Mr. Katselas was a graduate of East Pittsburgh High School, now in the Woodland Hills School District. He studied theater at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, graduating at 19.

After graduation, Mr. Katselas went to New York to break into theater, "scared stiff," as he later said, and studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

He gravitated quickly to directing. When he spotted Elia Kazan walking down the street, he chased him down and spoke to him in Greek. He worked with him and such other big-name directors as Joshua Logan and Sanford Meisner.

He made his New York directing debut with the original 1960 off-Broadway production of Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story." He was nominated for a Tony Award for the 1969 Broadway production of "Butterflies Are Free" and directed the 1972 movie starring Goldie Hawn.

Other movies he directed included "40 Carats" with Liv Ullman. On Broadway, he directed "The Rose Tattoo" (1966) and "Camino Real" (1970), and in Los Angeles he won critics' awards directing "The Seagull," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Streamers."

At the Pittsburgh Playhouse, he directed several shows, including "Blue Denim" with Keir Dullea and "Macbeth" with Robert Loggia and Salome Jens. In the 1970s, he performed a program of works by modern Greek poets, mainly Nobel Prize winners, for Pittsburgh's International Poetry Forum.

In Los Angeles, Mr. Katselas gave himself over to teaching, founding the Beverly Hills Playhouse acting school in 1978. Among other actors he taught were Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, Kate Hudson, Kim Cattrall, Chris Noth, Tyne Daly, Jenna Elfman, Robert Urich, Patrick Swayze, Tom Selleck and Tony Danza.

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

Mr. Katselas' experience as a teacher was distilled in his 1996 best-selling self-help book, "Dreams Into Action: Getting What You Want." In October, a text he used for decades was released as the book "Acting Class: Take a Seat."

Tasso and Chris Katselas were in Los Angeles when their brother died. The day after, they were invited to a memorial event where he had given the last of his famous acting classes just the Saturday before.

Some five dozen white roses led the way to where Mr. Katselas sat to teach. Waiting were candles, his photo and more than 100 friends and students.

"They used to applaud when he came in," Tasso Katselas of Shadyside said. On this occasion, as he and his brother appeared, they applauded for 10 minutes.

According to Joan Van Ark of the TV series "Knots Landing," Mr. Katselas "had a wonderful genius for perception and for seeing what was missing in a scene. He's just irreplaceable. As actors, we've lost our shepherd."

A memorial service is being planned in Los Angeles. There may be one on Broadway, as well.

Donations may be made to the nonprofit theater company Mr. Katselas helped create, Camelot Artists Productions, 254 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211.