HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UTA HAGEN
(June 12, 1919 - January 2004)

An actress/teacher wholly devoted to her craft.

Born in Gottingen, Germany, her family emigrated to the United States in 1924 when her father received a position at Cornell University.  Her father would later become the head of the department of art history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison but in 1937 she relocated to New York City. Her first professional role was as Ophelia opposite Eva Le Gallienne in the title role of Hamlet in Dennis, Massachusetts.  From there she went on to play the leading ingenue role of Nina in a Broadway production of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.  The experience left an indelible mark on her as she later reflected: 'They were an enormous influence on my life. I admired their passion for the theatre, and their discipline. It was a 24-hour-a-day affair and I never forgot it--never!"

She played Desdemona in a production which toured and played Broadway, starring the charismatic Paul Robeson as Othello and her-then husband Jose Ferrer as Iago.   From Desdemona to Blanche DuBois was a quantum leap and instead of being directed by Elia Kazan (who had staged the play on Broadway with Jessica Tandy as Blanche) she worked with Harold Clurman.

In her brilliant book 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 would play Blanche with four different Stanley Kowalskis including Anthony Quinn and Marlon Brando.
She won her first Tony Award in 1951 as the self-sacrificing wife Georgie in Clifford Odets'
The Country Girl. She won her second Tony Award in 1963 for originating the role of Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

              She and Herbert Berghof began an acting school in the West Village known as HB Studio in 1947. She would continue to perform but her love and passion for the actor were evident in the respect and love they gave back to her.  Her list of students includes Matthew Broderick, Christine Lahti, Amanda Peet, Jason Robards, Sigourney Weaver, Katie Finneran, Liza Minnelli, Jack Lemmon, Jon Stewart and Al Pacino.  She was the voice coach for Judy Garland's German accent in Judgment at Nuremberg.  Garland received an Oscar nomination for her performance.

In addition to Respect for Acting (1973) she wrote A Challenge for the Actor (1991), which advocates realistic acting (as opposed to pre-determined "formalistic" acting.) The actor puts his own psyche to use in finding identification with the role.  She would later "dissassociate" herself from her first book. 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.  "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."

     She was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981 and received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.  Three years later she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President George W. Bush.

    Uta believed  "You don't stop acting until you are dead."  And indeed she was costarring in
 Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks with David Hyde Pierce at the Geffen Playhouse in 2001until ill health forced her retirement.

     Her legacy lives on and every actor should own her video Uta Hagen's Acting Class a two-part set that captures the genius of her master classes.

      Think of Uta's portrayal of Nina in The Sea Gull as she reveals to Kostya what her own philosophy as an actor and teacher would become.  "I understand now, that in our work--and it makes no difference whether we are acting or whether we're writing--the main thing is not the fame, not the glory, not all the things I used to dream of; it's the ability to endure. Learn to bear your cross; have faith. I have faith, and for me the pain is less. And when I think about my vocation, I'm not afraid of life."