Stanislavski taught actors that the more they knew about the backgrounds of their characters -- how they would dress, what they would eat, how they grew up, etc. -- the more fully realized the characterization would be. If portraying a historical character, this meant researching that person's life in depth, including speech and movement patterns if recordings or videos were available. To portray fictitious characters, or those who existed in unfamiliar places or times, research into historical or foreign culture was necessary. Characters with special circumstances, such as blindness, disease, etc., required special research into how those things would manifest themselves in the character.
Stanislavski taught actors to focus on what their characters most want to achieve -- their specific objectives -- every moment throughout the course of the play. Each scene should be broken down into "beats" or "bits." The overall objective of the play, for example, might be for a character to win the love of the girl, while the objective of one beat in a scene might be to get a kiss from the girl.
Stanislavski believed that all actors have, inside of them, the emotional qualities necessary to play any character, but all actors don't necessarily share the same emotional experiences and qualities. Two actors playing the character of Hamlet, for example, will draw on different personal and emotional experiences from their own lives they feel relate to the character and, thus, deliver two very different versions of the character in their separate performances. "Emotional memory" is a tool an actor uses to tap into what is available to him emotionally. Actors access their emotional memories by reliving the experience of a significant event from their pasts or through exposing their "sense memory" to smells, sounds or sights that trigger an emotional connection to the emotions felt in a similar way by the character in the play.
Stanislavski believed that truth in acting is not the same as simply re-creating everyday life. Truthful acting onstage must be compelling to an audience and, as such, is rarely the mundane behavior common in everyday life. The power, the urgency and the heightened "stakes" of a fictional character's circumstances must be realized, leading the actor to a compelling characterization. Stanislavski was clear to point out that an actor's job is not to believe that he is, in fact, actually Hamlet. The actor, rather, must immerse himself in the imaginary circumstances he has created through his research, work on objectives, and employment of emotional and sense memory to create the "truth" of Hamlet for himself in the performance.