|
Home
Word
of the Day
Archives
Clever
Clue of the Month
The
Cruciverbalist
Links
Daily
Email
|
|
UTA
(OO-tuh)
Uta
Hagen: German born American actress and drama teacher Common
clues: Actress
Hagen, Tony winner Hagen; Hagen of Broadway; Hagen of “Reversal
of Fortune”; Hagen of stage and screen; Hagen of “Key
Largo” Crossword
puzzle frequency:
4 times a year Frequency
in English language:
41140 / 86800 Video: Uta
Hagen's Acting Class
We
must overcome the notion that we must be regular...it robs you of
the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre
~ Uta Hagen
Uta
Thyra Hagen (12 June 1919 – 14 January 2004) was a
German-born American actress and drama teacher. She originated
the role of Martha in the 1963 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (who called her "a
profoundly truthful actress"). Hagen was on the Hollywood
blacklist, in part because of her association with Paul Robeson,
and this curtailed film opportunities, focusing her to perform in
New York theaters. She won the Tony Award three times. She 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.
She was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.
Hagen
with Paul Robeson in the 1943-1945 Theatre Guild production of
Othello
Born
in Göttingen, Germany, Hagen and her family emigrated to the
United States in 1924, when her father received a position at
Cornell University. She 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. After spending one semester at the University of
Wisconsin, where her father was the head of the department of art
history, she left for New York City in 1937. Her first
professional role was as Ophelia opposite Eva Le Gallienne in the
title role of Hamlet in Dennis, Massachusetts in 1937.
Hagen
was cast, early on, as Ophelia by the actress-manager Eva
LeGallienne. From there, Hagen went on to play the leading
ingenue 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. 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!" The New York Times'
critic Brooks Atkinson hailed her Nina as "grace and
aspiration incarnate".
She
would go on to play 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 Jose 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
the "I-wear-the-pants-in-this-family-because-somebody's-got-to"
Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. (An
original cast recording was made of this show.) In 1981 she was
elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame and in 1999 received
a "Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award".
Hagen
was an influential acting teacher who taught, among others,
Matthew Broderick, Christine Lahti, Jason Robards, Sigourney
Weaver, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Lemmon, Charles
Nelson Reilly, Manu Tupou, Debbie Allen and Al Pacino. She was a
voice coach to Judy Garland, teaching a German accent, for the
picture Judgment at Nuremberg. Garland's performance earned her
an Academy Award nomination.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "uta_hagen".
TET
(401)
|
|
|