26 Facts About Uta Hagen

1.

Uta Thyra Hagen was a German-American actress and theatre practitioner.

2.

Uta Hagen later became a highly influential acting teacher at New York's Herbert Berghof Studio and authored best-selling acting texts, Respect for Acting, with Haskel Frankel, and A Challenge for the Actor.

3.

Uta Hagen was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1981.

4.

Uta Hagen twice won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.

5.

Uta Hagen appeared in productions of the University of Wisconsin High School and in summer stock productions of the Wisconsin Players.

6.

Uta Hagen studied acting briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1936.

7.

Uta Hagen was cast, early on, as Ophelia by the actress-manager Eva Le Gallienne.

8.

Uta Hagen played George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan on Broadway, and Desdemona in a production which toured and played Broadway, featuring Paul Robeson as Shakespeare's Othello and her then-husband Jose Ferrer as Iago.

9.

Uta Hagen 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.

10.

Uta Hagen had had a revelatory experience when she first worked with Clurman in 1947.

11.

Primarily noted for stage roles, Uta Hagen won her first Tony Award in 1951 for her performance as the self-sacrificing wife Georgie in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl.

12.

Uta Hagen was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award as "Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series" for her performance on the television soap opera One Life to Live.

13.

Uta Hagen taught at HB Studio, a well-known New York City acting school on a cobblestone, tree-shaded street in the West Village.

14.

Uta Hagen began there in 1947, and married its co-founder, Herbert Berghof, on 25 January 1957.

15.

Later in her life, Uta Hagen undertook a return to the stage, earning accolades for leading roles in Mrs Warren's Profession, Collected Stories, and Mrs Klein.

16.

Uta Hagen was an influential acting teacher who taught, among others, Matthew Broderick, Christine Lahti, Amanda Peet, Jason Robards, Sigourney Weaver, Katie Finneran, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Lemmon, Charles Nelson Reilly, Manu Tupou, Debbie Allen, Herschel Savage, George Segal, Jon Stewart, and Al Pacino.

17.

Uta Hagen was a voice coach to Judy Garland, teaching a German accent, for the picture Judgment at Nuremberg.

18.

Uta Hagen wrote Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor, which advocate realistic acting.

19.

In Respect for Acting, Uta Hagen credited director Harold Clurman with a turn-around in her perspective on acting:.

20.

Uta Hagen opened a new world in the professional theatre for me.

21.

Uta Hagen imposed no line readings, no gestures, no positions on the actors.

22.

Uta Hagen later "disassociated" herself from her first book, Respect for Acting.

23.

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.

24.

Uta Hagen was married to Jose Ferrer from 1938 until 1948.

25.

Uta Hagen married Herbert Berghof on 25 January 1957, a union that lasted for 33 years until his death in 1990.

26.

Uta Hagen died in Greenwich Village in 2004 after suffering a stroke in 2001.