Uta Hagen — Studio C

“Uta Hagen: Lady Invincible,” published by The Wisconsin Academy Review, 2000

At age 81, German-born actress Uta Hagen has been in the theater most of her life, starring on- and off-Broadway and operating a famous acting studio for the better half of a century. She was Blanche in A Street Car Named Desire, Georgie in The Country Girl, and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — roles that won her screen counterparts Best Actress Oscars (Hagen herself didn’t appear in a Hollywood film until 1972). The New York studio founded by her second husband, the late Herbert Berghof, has long been the setting for perhaps her greatest role, as teacher of a cast of thousands, young actors with names now more famous than her own: Jack Lemon, Jason Robards, Geraldine Page, Lily Tomlin, and Matthew Broderick.

Hagen first cultivated her own dramatic skills behind the footlights of Bascom Theater, appearing in productions of the long-defunct University of Wisconsin High School, and in summer stock productions of the Wisconsin Players. She left Madison in 1937, after only one semester at the UW, and quickly ensconced herself on stages large and small, appearing in almost a dozen shows before she turned 20.

In December 1944, she returned as a stage star with husband, José Ferrer, and the great Paul Robeson. They gave two sold-out performances of Othello, their wonderful stage success imported from Broadway.

The Moor In Madison

By then Othello had secured its place in the history of the American stage. The show was booked into Broadway’s Schubert Theater in 1943 and set a Broadway record for the longest run of a Shakespeare drama, with 295 performances. When it closed, capacity crowds were still energizing matinee and evening performances, but road contracts had been signed and the remote cities that dot the map awaited its arrival.

For a city like Madison, home to one of the production’s co-stars, a mail-order ticket scheme had to be devised; and even then, an estimated 3,500 mail orders were refunded. The day before the show the Capital Times reported that all copies of Othello had been checked out of public libraries.

Two performances were arranged at the recently constructed Wisconsin Union Theater, a spacious 1,300-seat venue not yet completed when Hagen had left Madison. After each performance, Hagen greeted friends, family, former classmates and her many fans backstage, extending a long moment’s glory that had seen repeated curtain calls and even tears.

The day after her performances, amid larger headlines reporting Tokyo bombing raids and strategic gains of American forces on the European stage, Hagen’s homecoming was reported as front-page news. “A sort of rhapsodic homecoming reverie,” declared the Capital Times, calling the performances “one of the major events in the annals of Madison’s theatrical history.” “The acclaim Othello won here,” the paper asserted, “has seldom been equaled.”

Hagen returned to Madison again in 1949 on the eve of perhaps her greatest breakthrough yet. A year earlier she had spelled Jessica Tandy in the role of Blanche DuBois for six weeks during the original run of the Tennessee Williams dramaA Streetcar Named Desire. She then performed the role for nine months opposite Anthony Quinn in the touring production. Now Hagen was to succeed Tandy in the long-running Broadway production. Having originally worked out the play during a six-week period at home in her Washington Square apartment, and never having seen Tandy’s portrayal — so as not to “drift, even unconsciously, into the pattern set by [Tandy],” the actress said at the time — Hagen made the part her own. Said Harold V. Cohen in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “It is the kind of performance acting textbooks can be built around.”

The textbook would not come for nearly 25 years; but Hagen had by this time assumed a second professional role: as instructor. In 1947 she met the actor Herbert Berghof, who founded an acting school that same year. Hagen began teaching at HB Studios (Herbert Berghof Studios), taking her responsibilities very seriously. While touring as Blanche DuBois, she took time during a lengthy run in Chicago to conduct Tuesday workshops using scenes from Shakespeare plays.

The Streetcar National Company was booked into the Union Theater for a three-night stand in May 1949. Hagen had long felt an urgency about returning to Madison. Now, with the Broadway role awaiting her, this second homecoming took on a special importance. These were to be Hagen’s last road company performances before traveling back to New York.

Her flight landed at Madison’s Municipal Airport on a cool Sunday afternoon. A crowd of about 25, including her father, Professor Oskar Hagen, had turned out to greet her. “Welcome Home Uta Hagen,” read a banner in the background as a State Journal photographer captured the tender embrace shared between father and daughter [see photograph above].

A sell-out crowd passionately received the opening night performance, and the critical encomiums echoed past praise of her performances. “A characterization brilliant and frightening,” said the Cardinal. “Truly memorable” wrote theCapital Times critic. Following the performance, Professor Hagen and his daughter shared bows and the cast gave Hagen a silver box inscribed, “We all love you.” “That did it,” Hagen later recalled in a New York Times Magazine article. “I cried for three days straight.”

After the engagement, Hagen returned to New York, where she played the part of Blanche DuBois eight times a week for two years — without a vacation.

When She Was Small

Uta Hagen came to live in Madison with her family at age six. Her father, Dr. Oskar F.L. Hagen, was by then established as both artist and academic, teaching, lecturing and authoring scholarly texts on art history; composing music; and serving as organizer and chief director of Göttingen Handel festivals in Germany. Dr. Hagen was brought here to establish the UW-Madison art history department, which he served as chairman for 22 years. His devotion to his work and to the arts was absolute and inexhaustible.

Uta Hagen’s mother, Thyra Amalie Hagen, a native of Flensburg, Germany, was a soprano, who performed frequently around the country. She continued her career in Madison, playing the role of Marguerite in the Goethe drama Faust (not the Gounod opera) in a production directed by and co-starring her husband. When it opened at the old Bascom Theater in March 1928, another show was added by popular demand.

These performances likely left an impression on eight-year-old Uta (in fact, she later produced the show at HB Studios), as did a trip her family made to Germany when she was nine. There she saw the actress Elisabeth Bergner portray Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan, a role she would herself play on Broadway. Having decided at the age of six to become an actress, she was entranced by the performance and spoke about the experience years later.

As the daughter of a university professor, Hagen attended the University of Wisconsin High School, an “alternative” school that had opened in 1911 at State Street and Gilman. A campus location was established a few years later. With the emphasis on the arts, the school seemed uniquely suited to Hagen. She became involved in drama, glee club and on the forensics team, where she won awards.

But drama clearly was to be her calling. In her senior year annual, the largely ironic “Vocational Placement Record” soberly predicted “Professional Actress” for Hagen. And for obvious reason: She gave show-stealing performances all through high school. With her senior year came her most notable stage role, as the princess in Robert Sherwood’s The Queen’s Husband. Uta Hagen “displayed a remarkable talent for intelligent character composition,” the Cardinalreviewer staidly put it before speculating, presciently, that the young actress would “someday reach the heights.”

Summer stock productions such as Noël Coward’s Hay Fever gave Hagen, still in high school, the opportunity to perform on stage with UW drama students (as well as with her brother, Holger, who played her brother on stage, too). But being a UW drama student proved less seductive than a chance to fulfill her classmates’ lofty predictions. In 1937, after only a semester, Hagen had left for New York.

“When I was 17 years old and wanted to go out on my own, my mother said, ‘Go’,” Hagen later recalled in a Wall Street Journal story. “My mother, in particular, had a wild desire that human beings should be free.”

Theater as Disneyland

Sixty-three years after she left the University of Wisconsin, Uta Hagen returned to Madison last May to accept an honorary doctorate and give commencement addresses. With her usual candor, she told graduating students: “The only advice I can give you is from my experience. Don’t want to get rich. The pursuit of money today is revolting.”

That sort of advice is not at all surprising coming from someone who has lived in the same Manhattan apartment since 1949. The acting school she runs is a bargain. Her chief criticism of the contemporary American theater, particularly Broadway, is that it has become too expensive to operate a theater, to produce a show, to pay the performers. “Actors get too much money,” she protests.

Those costs, of course, affect ticket prices and, consequently, the type of audiences that come to see live theater. In her view, the theater has become “an elite luxury; or much worse than that, Disneyland. It becomes cheesy — crappy musicals that aren’t worth anyone’s time. This is what makes a horrendous amount of money,” she noted during her spring visit to Madison.

As long ago as 1962 Hagen said this: “All the worry [on Broadway] is about commercial failure — and never whether it might or might not be artistically satisfying.” Today her attitude has only sharpened. “I don’t want to be marketable. I find it shameful,” she says.

Still, she finds reasons for encouragement. Though the theater is in flux, and hopelessly mired in mediocrity and high costs, Hagen feels that the situation is not as bleak as it was 10 years ago. “There is gradual growing of respect for off-Broadway. Ten years ago there was only Broadway, and off-Broadway was thought of as a far-distant second citizen or third cousin who didn’t matter. I think they realized that almost everything that has any importance on Broadway has been developed off-Broadway or in the regional theaters.”

Off-Broadway has been the setting of two of Hagen’s recent successes, though she hastens to add that she has always worked off-Broadway. She won great acclaim for her roles in the 1995 production Mrs. Klein, and last year’s Collected Stories earned her the distinction as the “Number One actress on or off Broadway for the 1998-99 season,” according toNew York Times arts critic Vincent Canby.

But as she has aged, meaningful roles have not been easy to find — nor have they ever been. “It was always difficult when I was younger, because a lot of great plays don’t come along and not enough people do revivals of great plays. There are a million parts I should have played — in Shakespeare, in Ibsen, et cetera — that were not done enough because in this country we don’t do enough classics. As I get older, obviously, because of age, the roles are more and more limited. At my age it is very difficult to find [good roles], and I’ve just happened to luck out the last few years.”

This summer, Hagen, who turned 81 in June, performed at the Stratford Festival in Canada. During her spring trip to Madison, she was named first laureate of the Minnerva Society at a special reception at Ten Chimneys, the lavish (and authentically preserved) former residence of the distinguished actors Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. Upon receiving a special plaque, which read “one of the finest actresses to grace the American stage,” Hagen commented wistfully, “This would mean so much to my father.”

She spoke again about her parents in a recent phone interview. “My father and my mother were the main influences in my life,” she said. “Everything that I believe, that I’ve done with my life, all came from them.”