Uta Thyra Hagen (12 June 1919 – 14 January 2004) was a German-American actress and theatre practitioner. She originated the role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, who called her "a profoundly truthful actress." Because Hagen was on the Hollywood blacklist, in part because of her association with Paul Robeson, her film opportunities dwindled and she focused her career on New York theatre.
Born in Göttingen, Germany,[3] daughter of Thyra A. (née Leisner), a trained opera singer, and Oskar Hagen,[4] an art historian and musician, Hagen and her family emigrated to the United States in 1924. Though shipping records indicate that he took a position at Cornell University,[5] his new position was in fact at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[6] Uta was raised in Madison, Wisconsin. She appeared in productions of the University of Wisconsin High School and in summer stock productions of the Wisconsin Players. She studied acting briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1936.[7] After spending one semester at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her father was the head of the department of art history, she left for New York City in 1937.[8] Her first professional role was as Ophelia opposite Eva Le Gallienne in the title role of Hamlet in Dennis, Massachusetts, in 1936.[3]
Career
Hagen was cast, early on, as Ophelia by the actress-manager Eva Le Gallienne. From there, Hagen went on to play the leading ingénue role of Nina in a Broadway production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull which featured Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. It was 1938; Hagen was just 18.[3] This experience left an indelible mark on the young actress, as she later reflected, "My next job was Nina in The Seagull, [her Broadway bow] with the Lunts, on Broadway. That sounds incredible, too. They were an enormous influence on my life." She admired "their passion for the theatre, and their discipline. It was a 24-hour-a-day affair, and I never forgot it—never!"[9]The New York Times' critic Brooks Atkinson hailed her Nina as "grace and aspiration incarnate."[10]
She played George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1951) on Broadway, and Desdemona in a production which toured and played Broadway, featuring Paul Robeson as Shakespeare's Othello and her then-husband José Ferrer as Iago. She took over the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire for the national tour, which was directed not by Elia Kazan who had directed the Broadway production but by Harold Clurman. Hagen had had a revelatory experience when she first worked with Clurman in 1947. In Respect for Acting, she credited her discoveries with Clurman as the springboard for what she would later explore with her husband Herbert Berghof: "how to find a true technique of acting, how to make a character flow through me." She played Blanche (on the road and on Broadway) opposite at least four different Stanley Kowalskis, including Anthony Quinn and Marlon Brando. Through interviews with her and contemporary criticism, the report is that Hagen's Blanche refocused the audience's sympathies with Blanche rather than with Stanley (where the Brando/Kazan production had leaned). Primarily noted for stage roles, Hagen won her first Tony Award in 1951 for her performance as the self-sacrificing wife Georgie in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl. She won again in 1963 for originating the role of Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In 1981 she was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame and in 1999 received a "Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award."
Hagen considered the period between 1938 and 1947 as "the transitional years of my career, during which I lost my way and a love of acting until I finally regained it to begin a true life in the theater."[10]
Although she appeared in some movies, because of the Hollywood blacklist she had more limited output in film and on television, not making her cinematic debut until 1972. She would later comment about being blacklisted, "that fact kept me pure."[3]
She taught at HB Studio, a well-known New York City acting school on a cobblestone, tree-shaded street in the West Village. She began there in 1947, and married its co-founder, Herbert Berghof, on 25 January 1957. Later in her life, Hagen undertook a return to the stage, earning accolades for leading roles in Mrs. Warren's Profession (1985), Collected Stories, and Mrs. Klein. After Berghof's death in 1990, she became the school's chairperson.[11]
She also wrote Respect for Acting (1973) and A Challenge for the Actor (1991), which advocate realistic acting (as opposed to pre-determined "formalistic" acting). In her mode of realism, the actor puts his own psyche to use in finding identification with the role," trusting that a form will result.[13] In Respect for Acting, Hagen credited director Harold Clurman with a turn-around in her perspective on acting:
In 1947, I worked in a play under the direction of Harold Clurman. He opened a new world in the professional theatre for me. He took away my 'tricks'. He imposed no line readings, no gestures, no positions on the actors. At first I floundered badly because for many years I had become accustomed to using specific outer directions as the material from which to construct the mask for my character, the mask behind which I would hide throughout the performance. Mr Clurman refused to accept a mask. He demanded ME in the role. My love of acting was slowly reawakened as I began to deal with a strange new technique of evolving in the character. I was not allowed to begin with, or concern myself at any time with, a preconceived form. I was assured that a form would result from the work we were doing.
Hagen later "disassociated" herself from her first book, Respect for Acting.[9] In Challenge for the Actor, she redefined a term which she had initially called "substitution", an esoteric technique for alchemizing elements of an actor's life with his/her character work, calling it "transference" instead. Though Hagen wrote that the actor should identify the character he plays with feelings and circumstances from his own life, she also makes clear that:
Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters' actions which reveal the character in the play.
Respect for Acting is used as a textbook for many college acting classes. She also wrote a 1976 cookbook, Love for Cooking. In 2002, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush at a ceremony held at the White House.
In 2001, Hagen agreed to be filmed giving master classes in NYC, LA, Toronto and Chicago by Karen Ludwig and Pennie du Pont, who released the video entitled Uta Hagen's Acting Class, a two-part set that captures her master classes.[citation needed] The video has been thoroughly studied and is now taught in many acting classes.[14][failed verification]
Uta Hagen was married to José Ferrer from 1938 until 1948.[3] They had one child together, their daughter Leticia (born 15 October 1940). They divorced partly because of Hagen's long-concealed affair with Paul Robeson, her co-star in Othello. Hagen married Herbert Berghof on 25 January 1957, a union that lasted for 33 years until his death in 1990. Hagen died in Greenwich Village in 2004 after suffering a stroke in 2001.[3]
In popular culture
In 2009, Weird Al Yankovic’s “Skipper Dan” referenced Uta Hagen in the opening verse:
I starred in every high school play Blew every drama teacher away I graduated first in my class at Juilliard Took every acting workshop I could And I dreamed of Hollywood While I read my Uta Hagen and studied the Bard[22]
Theatre
Her name was dropped in the song La Vie Bohème from the 1996 award winning and groundbreaking rock opera Rent written and composed by the late Jonathan Larson: "To the stage, To Uta, To Buddha, Pablo Neruda too."[23]
"Once in a while, there's stuff that makes me say, 'That's what theatre's about'. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often."[27]
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play written by Tennessee Williams and first performed on Broadway on December 3, 1947. The play dramatizes the experiences of Blanche DuBois, a former Southern belle who, after encountering a series of personal losses, leaves her once-prosperous situation to move into a shabby apartment in New Orleans rented by her younger sister and brother-in-law.
Geraldine Sue Page was an American actress. With a career which spanned four decades across film, stage, and television, Page was the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four nominations for the Tony Award.
Katie Finneran is an American actress best known for her Tony Award-winning performances in the Broadway play Noises Off in 2002, and the musical Promises, Promises in 2010.
Colleen Rose Dewhurst was a Canadian-American actress mostly known for theatre roles. She was a renowned interpreter of the works of Eugene O'Neill on the stage, and her career also encompassed film, early dramas on live television, and performances in Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. One of her last roles was playing Marilla Cuthbert in the Kevin Sullivan television adaptations of the Anne of Green Gables series and her reprisal of the role in the subsequent TV series Road to Avonlea. In the United States, Dewhurst won two Tony Awards and four Emmy Awards for her stage and television work. In addition to other Canadian honors over the years, Dewhurst won two Gemini Awards for her portrayal of Marilla Cuthbert; once in 1986 and again in 1988. It is arguably her best known role because of the Kevin Sullivan produced series’ continuing popularity and also the initial co-production by the CBC; allowing for rebroadcasts over the years on it, and also on PBS in the United States. The initial broadcast alone was seen by millions of viewers.
Estelle Parsons is an American actress, singer and stage director.
Lois Maureen Stapleton was an American actress. She received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Tony Awards, in addition to a nomination for a Grammy Award.
Stella Adler was an American actress and acting teacher. She founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City in 1949. Later in life she taught part time in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her protégée, actress Joanne Linville, who continued to teach Adler's technique.
Harold Edgar Clurman was an American theatre director and drama critic. In 2003, he was named one of the most influential figures in U.S. theater by PBS. He was one of the three founders of New York City's Group Theatre (1931–1941). He directed more than 40 plays in his career and, during the 1950s, was nominated for a Tony Award as director for several productions. In addition to his directing career, he was drama critic for The New Republic (1948–1952) and The Nation (1953–1980), helping shape American theater by writing about it. Clurman wrote seven books about the theatre, including his memoir The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties (1961).
Shirley Knight Hopkins was an American actress who appeared in more than 50 feature films, television films, television series, and Broadway and Off-Broadway productions in her career, playing leading and character roles. She was a member of the Actors Studio.
Laurette Taylor was an American stage and silent film star who is particularly well known for originating the role of Amanda Wingfield in the first production of Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie.
L. Scott Caldwell is an American actress perhaps best known for her roles as Deputy U.S. Marshall Erin Poole in The Fugitive (1993) and Rose on the television series Lost.
Ruth A. Sobotka was an Austrian-born American dancer, costume designer, art director, painter, and actress.
Respect for Acting by actress and teacher Uta Hagen is a textbook for use in acting classes. Hagen's instructions and examples guide the user through practical problems such as: "How do I talk to the audience?" and "How do I stay fresh in a long run?". She advocates the actor's use of substitution in informing and shaping the actions of the character the actor is playing.
Jakob Garfein was an American film and theatre director, writer, teacher, producer, and key figure of the Actors Studio.
Susan Batson is an American producer, actress, author, acting coach, and a life member of the Actors Studio. Batson graduated from Girls Latin School and Emerson College.
The HB Studio is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization offering professional training in the performing arts through classes, workshops, free lectures, theater productions, theater rentals, a theater artist residency program, as well as full-time study through their International Student Program and Uta Hagen Institute.
Doreen Cannon was born and raised in New York City. She trained as an actress at the HB Studio in Manhattan for over 10 years with Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof. Her contemporaries included Peter Falk, Geraldine Page, Sandy Dennis, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. She appeared in many plays off Broadway and in Summer Stock alongside such stars as Dorothy Lamour, Robert Alda, Alan Alda and Basil Rathbone. She married an English Property Developer David Cannon in NYC and came over to London in 1959. She was subsequently invited by George Devine to teach master workshops at The Royal Court Theatre.
Presentational acting and the related representational acting are opposing ways of sustaining the actor–audience relationship. With presentational acting, the actor acknowledges the audience. With representational acting, the audience is studiously ignored and treated as voyeurs.
Herbert Berghof was an Austrian-American actor, director and acting teacher.
The Country Girl is a 1950 dramatic play by American playwright Clifford Odets which was subsequently adapted as a film of the same name in 1954, starring Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly.
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