She has been called—by legions of devoted friends, students, and colleagues—a tough broad, an anti-hypocrite (Edward Albee's label), a workhorse, a perfectionist, a spectacular cook, demanding, kind. She could be seen cheerfully sweeping the stage of the HB Studio or devouring a piece of chocolate, both with equal gusto.
When the great actor and master teacher Uta Hagen died on Jan. 14 at the age of 84—after a 2001 stroke that had left her in ill health—she was perhaps the last of her kind: an actor whose true passion was the stage, and whose raison d'être was not only to reveal the character and tell the playwright's story with the deepest and most detailed truthfulness imaginable but also to pass on the acting lessons she'd learned over a lifetime to those who would pick up the torch.
Uta Thyra Hagen was born in Göttingen, Germany, June 12, 1919, but raised in Madison, Wis., from the age of 6 by an art history professor father and opera singer mother. Stage-struck at age 9 from seeing Elisabeth Bergner in St. Joan, Hagen decided to be an actor (she herself would later play the eponymous Joan). Her first role was in Noël Coward's Hay Fever at age 17, followed by a term at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
At 18, a fervent Hagen wrote to Eva Le Gallienne, asking for an audition. Sight unseen, the famous star hired the girl to play Ophelia opposite her Hamlet on Cape Cod. ("We wove our own costumes at her looms, and it was a phenomenal experience for me," Hagen told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in a 1998 PBS interview.)
A year later, in 1938, Hagen debuted on Broadway as Nina in Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne's production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Altogether she appeared in 22 Broadway shows, including A Streetcar Named Desire (playing Blanche on the national tour with Anthony Quinn after substituting for Jessica Tandy in New York opposite Marlon Brando), Clifford Odets' The Country Girl (for which she won her first Tony, in 1950, but she never really liked the play), Shaw's St. Joan, and Turgenev's A Month in the Country. In 1962 she created the role of the braying Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for which she garnered her second Tony. (Her third, in 1999, was for lifetime achievement.)
Her Desdemona to Paul Robeson's Othello in 1943 made her the first white woman to kiss a black man on the Broadway stage. According to a close associate, she was also Robeson's lover. When they toured the show, she made sure he got into hotels and restaurants. Her association with Robeson, a Communist Party member, her own "liberal Democrat" viewpoints (as she termed them), and her refusal to "name names" later resulted in her being blacklisted for 10 years. Even as late as 1970, a TV producer apparently had difficulty hiring her. "The government still owes me an apology," Hagen told Gross, adding that the blacklist years were the only time in her life that she was truly frightened.
She married José Ferrer, who was Iago to Robeson's Othello, in 1938, and they divorced in 1948. She married the love of her life, actor and acting teacher Herbert Berghoff—Herbie, she called him—in 1951. She'd originally met him when he came in as a replacement in a play she was in, directed by Harold Clurman. "I thought he was a strange man," she told Gross. "A couple of kisses, and a couple of hugs, and a couple of weeks later we hit the sack and we never left."
Her strongest claim to fame was her lasting influence as a generous, no-nonsense teacher who trained a huge contingent of American actors from the late 1940s through the first years of the 21st century. The students who have passed through the HB Studio—the acting school she cofounded with Berghoff and took over when he died in 1990—include, to mention just a few, F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, and Al Pacino.
Always preferring stage to screen (co-actor Jenny Sullivan remembers her joking during a shoot, "OK, now we're going to do Meaningful Look No. 1"), she nevertheless appeared in several films, including The Other (1972), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and Reversal of Fortune (1990), as well as TV adaptations of classics (including A Month in the Country) and guest roles in contemporary shows (Lou Grant, The Twilight Zone, and more).
Her later stage performances were Off-Broadway, where she starred in Nicholas Wright's Mrs. Klein and Donald Margulies' Collected Stories. Her final appearance was in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles. There she played opposite David Hyde Pierce; both vowed they wouldn't take the play on to New York without the other. (The play closed in L.A., where it was hit, when Pierce had to return to the Frasier set.)
Six years before she died, Hagen—a chain smoker with a love for "artery-clogging" foods like butter, meat, nuts, chocolate—told Gross, "I can work 12 hours in a row and not fall down."
Indeed in the 2002 documentary Uta Hagen's Acting Class, by Karen Ludwig and Pennie du Pont with help from Marlo Thomas, Hagen's face, wreathed in cigarette smoke, looks unlined, her energy youthful and intensely focused. The video reveals her in casual clothes, sneakers, glasses, and a series of funny hats, with the latest of a line of tiny poodles (this one named G.B. for George Bernard Shaw) at her side. Familiar faces are glimpsed in the classroom: Gary Shandling, Whoopi Goldberg, Lindsay Crouse, and others. Hagen's laser-sharp critiques and unwavering focus on—indeed, obvious relish in—the student performances are a revelation: Here is a teacher who could immediately zoom in on the acting problem at hand, explain it in the simplest and gentlest terms, and effect instant change. Her deep understanding of human behavior and motivation—and the ways in which, over the course of a lifetime of acting and teaching, she distilled her approach into a series of basic "object exercises," as they are called—are plainly seen in the documentary. They are, as Ludwig explains, "the scaffolding upon which her acting techniques revolve."
Hagen was all about bringing honest and meticulous self-observation to the stage; as Ludwig, an HB teacher, says, it's about "how I live life, how I talk to myself out loud, how I make a cup of tea…." Into each role, the actor must channel the deepest possible self-knowledge.
Particularly endearing in the video is the obvious sincerity with which Hagen concluded each critique: "Excellent. Thank you," or "OK. Very good."
For Berghoff and Hagen, it was never about the money. The decision to raise rates from $5 to $7 per class was made over Hagen's protestations, and the fee never rose again. She was a Luddite to the end; only after her death did the HB office began to computerize. A sort of mom-and-pop school, it still lacks voicemail.
Hagen was very close to her daughter by Ferrer, Leticia (Letty) Ferrer, a New York actor. "I don't think it's easy being Uta's daughter; I'm not going to say it was the Waltons," says one friend of Hagen. "But they lived 10 blocks apart and talked every day."
When Hagen died, she left behind not only a trail of broken hearts but also scores of theatre artists who said she changed their lives profoundly, both personally and professionally.
Here are some of their stories.
The Gazpacho Incident
Hagen's penchant for cooking was legendary. To be asked to a dinner party at her Long Island retreat was a privilege. Donna DeMatteo, now head of the HB playwriting department, eventually became a lifelong friend but was a bit intimidated when first invited. Berghoff made her swear to eat nothing for at least 10 hours in advance; his wife was a fierce cook who would be "pissed off" if her guests didn't eat everything. But during the long trip to Montauk, a ravenous DeMatteo couldn't resist gulping a few stale peanuts. All went well during the hors d'oeuvres—brie, caviar, champagne. "I know you'll eat everything," said Hagen, smiling. But, says DeMatteo, those stale peanuts were "coming and going," especially after a generous serving of the first course, gazpacho. "Is something wrong?" enquired Hagen. No, said DeMatteo: "What else can you say to a two-time Tony Award winner? Especially after taking an oath." DeMatteo dutifully struggled to gorge on gazpacho—and Hagen, ever the gracious hostess, refilled her bowl. When Hagen momentarily answered the phone, DeMatteo slipped into the bathroom and poured the cold soup down the toilet. Hagen returned, saw the empty dish—and promptly refilled it. With Hagen in the kitchen, DeMatteo raced once again to the toilet with it. Hagen returned, looked with amazement at the empty bowl, and scolded, "You better save room for the rest of the meal!" Somehow, DeMatteo survived to tell the story to Hagen years later. The cook, who loved a funny story, laughed.
Uta the Teacher
"She opened for me the door to the truth of psychological acting," says Ed Hastings, former artistic director of American Conservatory Theater and now an independent director. He studied with her on and off for about four years. "I suddenly understood what I thought I already knew—that you have to be honest with yourself about what you're doing and what the character wants…. It's about action and obstacle. And that carries over into real life—you don't fool around with a lot of pretending or nonsense in life; you get down to the nitty gritty. She was never embarrassed or afraid to talk about what she felt, so you began to relate to your own life, because she did."
Ted Brunetti, who teaches directors at USC film school and was Hagen's longtime co-actor, student, and friend, comments, "The lessons I learned from her made me a better person in terms of being responsible and disciplined."
Says Kevin Gleason, a New York actor who also works in the HB Studio office and helped care for her at the end, "She knew if you were prepared or not. If you weren't prepared, she'd rip you apart." Did she have favorite students? "I know she had them, but you couldn't tell. She was very magnanimous. Maybe she was a little preferential to the good-looking young men; she always had the young guys around her to the very end."
Ludwig had trouble convincing her mentor to be videotaped for Uta Hagen's Acting Class. "She'd say 'No, I don't want a camera in the classroom, I don't want to distract the actors.' Her first concern was for the actor, not to aggrandize herself." But, depressed after the early closure of Mrs. Klein in Chicago, Hagen finally capitulated.
Recalls Ludwig, "She never put anybody down. She encouraged us to start our own theatres—don't wait for somebody to call you." She adds, "We always felt like colleagues. It wasn't about her, about standing to applaud her. She was an actress teaching acting, bringing back to the classroom things she'd learned nightly onstage."
Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon compares Hagen's acting techniques to her renowned love for cooking: "Her thing is the recipe. You want to create a role? There's a recipe you can follow. Maybe you'll improvise a bit, put in your own spices. But the closer you follow the recipe, the more alive your scene becomes." Adds Nixon, "When you have a bad director and bad script, and there's nothing there, and everyone's talking to you in generalities, and it's all gooey, you go back to these things and it gives a texture and reality and stakes to the scene."
Jill Clayburgh remembers the first monologue she did in Hagen's class, when she was still a college student. Hagen explained to her how to personalize, how to "endow" everything—lines, objects, actions—with meaningful, resonant properties. Clayburgh was astounded at how alive the monologue suddenly became. "And Uta was so appreciative, gasping, laughing. It was a great moment in my training. She was always such a genuine enthusiast of people's work."
"I was in class with Steve McQueen, Charles Nelson Reilly, Gerry Page," reminisces Jerry Stiller. "I'd gotten into class I think because of Anne [Meara, already a student, and Stiller's wife]." Stiller, like almost everybody else, had to audition for entry. "I was just trying to learn what a beat was, what an action was—it was all new terminology to me." He and Meara found themselves cast in Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan with Hagen and became part of what he calls her "acting family." He says, "She was consumed with the feeling that theatre was the one place where you could [transmit] the message of how to make the world a better place. She felt you can teach the craft of acting and the world will become a better place."
He observes that whereas some teachers might come in to class having a bad day, Hagen never came in with any objective other than to teach; her attention was undivided.
Brunetti says, "She could be abrasive, she could scare the shit out of people, and some didn't cope well with her delivery system." But Hagen was his biggest influence, both personally and professionally, next to his parents. One of the first things he remembers her saying is, "My goal is to create real human beings in time and place." He remarks, "All her work was based on an understanding of human behavior. She'd say, 'What does bigger than life mean? Nothing is more fascinating than human behavior.' At age 82 she was still a student of acting." He adds, "She didn't want people dependent on her; she wasn't into the guru thing."
Uta the Woman
"She was an artist in all the moments of her life: a flower arrangement, a dinner party, walking on the beach," exults HB teacher/director Trudy Steibl, who studied with her for 15 years. "It was all conditioned by discipline. She was up at 5, and when you arrived she'd already be showered, done the laundry, cleaned, and was ready for the New York Times crossword puzzle. She was always real, never pretended to be anything other than what she was. She had a lack of vanity; she just wanted to be in service to the play and the character…. No matter what happened to her, she went toward life." Steibl even perceives her trademark cigarettes as emblematic of an indomitable life force: "She was always sucking in life and giving it back out." Steibl remembers a funny little dance Hagen did when they'd leave her house: "Fingers up in the air, swaying her hips."
Always political, Hagen reveled in heated discussions, adored Jimmy Carter, donated money to causes. "She never shied away from giving her opinion, no matter what the consequences," says Steibl. By the same token, she'd never hesitate to give a compliment: "She'd call you 'my angel,' almost schmaltzy."
Not that she was always easy to get along with. One associate mentions a falling-out with Geraldine Page and also with famed director Charles Nelson Reilly, who nevertheless was one of her dearest friends at the end, and who always made her laugh. She was a "tough cookie," as one friend comments. But, as another friend observes, those who knew her loved her for that quality, even though she sometimes put her foot in her mouth. "She wasn't the perfect human being," allows Brunetti, "but she was one hell of a force."
The Practical Joke
Years ago, Jenny Sullivan and John Ritter, on location with Hagen in the Gold Country, were invited to have dinner at her cabin in the mountains and to spend the night. They were suitably intimidated; a teenage Sullivan had seen Hagen in Virginia Woolf and felt she was going off to dine with Martha. But Hagen got summoned for a late-night shoot as they were getting blitzed on wine before the meal. "I don't know what possessed John and me, but it got later and later, and where's Uta, and we short-sheeted the bed," confesses Sullivan. "She got in about 3 or 4, when we were already asleep. The next morning there was a brunch and she didn't say a word." Years later, Sullivan saw Hagen at a party after the opening of Mrs. Klein. "There Uta is, queen of the ball, smoking, surrounded by people. I approached and said, 'Uta, I don't know if you remember me…' And she said, 'Oh, my God, Jenny,' and turned to the crowd and said, 'This woman short-sheeted my bed.' I told John, and he loved that."
Uta the Actor
"When I saw her perform, I never saw the work," says Lisa Pelikan, a student in the late 1990s.
Tom Troupe, who started studying with Hagen in 1950 (in a class with Page, Jason Robards, and Shelley Berman), saw her in The Country Girl about 25 times and claims she got better with each performance. He also saw Six Dance Lessons about half a dozen times, and she was different each time. Bill Carden, an HB director, wrote, "She never said a line the same way twice; it was always in response to what had just been said."
Adds Troupe, "You always saw Uta, different versions of her, but always her." She used to quote Duse, he says: "The only thing an actor has to offer is her soul." Offering up her soul didn't necessarily come easily for Hagen, though; Troupe says she'd sometimes run to the bathroom and throw up before performances.
Hagen was unapologetic about her quirks. Hyde Pierce wrote that when the director of Six Dance Lessons suggested performing without intermission, Hagen was adamant: "[S]he had no intention of going an hour and a half without a cigarette." Hyde Pierce also noted that when she fell off the stage during the second preview—at age 82—she had to be persuaded not to finish the play and instead go to the emergency room. Later she told him she was sure that if she'd gone back on, she'd have been applauded.
Hagen loved playing Shaw's women because of their strength. Some might have wondered why she took on Six Dance Lessons, material that was slight compared to the classical and contemporary plays for which she was known. The role was rumored to have previously been rejected by Gena Rowlands and Julie Harris. But Hagen was delighted to be cast in a role so completely unlike all the strong women that she usually played. Also, she immediately liked Hyde Pierce.
When she died, Michael Feingold wrote in the Village Voice that after seeing her in Virginia Woolf, he was terrified to meet her years later in person. Yet he discovered in her offstage persona only hints of the ferocious Martha. "I found this to be true, subsequently, in every other role I saw her play," he wrote. "Each was a completely different person, a not-Uta who had some traits in common with Uta…."
To Stiller, seeing her onstage was like seeing a piece of sculpture come to life—"so defined, so strong."
Finale
By the time Hagen appeared at the Geffen, her health was failing. She had glaucoma, she'd had several root canals, she'd never fully recovered from her stroke. One day she and her friend, longtime Broadway and Kennedy Center stage manager Mitch Erickson, were driving down Pacific Coast Highway from the Malibu beach house where Hagen was staying for the run of the show ("I cannot and will not stand three months in a Hollywood Hotel!" Hagen had declared). They were on their way to the theatre, says Erickson. "I am so happy," said Hagen. "I just love David Hyde Pierce. I love getting to the theatre and doing this show." Long pause. Then: "Christ. What would it be like if I was feeling good?" BSW
A memorial for Uta Hagen will be held on March 25 at 1 p.m. at the Majestic Theatre in New York.
Back Stage West thanks Letty Ferrer, Ted Brunetti, and Bob Callely for providing us with photographs from the Hagen estate.