Uta Hagen, 84; Tony Winner, Teacher at Famed Acting School

Uta Hagen, known for her signature Broadway turn as Martha, the raging wife in Edward Albee’s classic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and also as a legendary teacher who nurtured dozens of future stars, has died. She was 84.

Hagen’s daughter, Leticia Ferrer, said her mother died Wednesday in her apartment overlooking Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. She had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in October 2001, Ferrer said.

Hagen won three Tony Awards in a stage career that began in the 1930s with classic roles opposite legends of the early 20th century theater; it extended into a new century as, at the age of 80, she reprised her Martha in “Virginia Woolf” to ecstatic reviews.

The husky-voiced partisan of the theater devoted relatively scant time and concern to film and television, but was one of America’s most impassioned and influential teachers of acting. She taught for more than 50 years at Manhattan’s HB Studio, founded by her second husband, Herbert Berghof.

The school’s alumni roster reads like a thespian hall of fame, including Jack Lemmon, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Geraldine Page, Stockard Channing, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Matthew Broderick.

Hagen published two widely read books on acting, “Respect for Acting” (1973) and “Challenge for the Actor” (1991). She also wrote a cookbook called “Love for Cooking.”

Hagen gave her last performance, at age 82, on Aug. 21, 2001, at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, playing opposite David Hyde Pierce in Richard Alfieri’s “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.”

Pierce remained close to Hagen after that production. Ferrer said her mother died Wednesday a moment after Pierce called to bid her goodbye, his voice coming over a receiver that another friend held to Hagen’s ear.

On Thursday, Pierce issued a one-sentence statement: “The American theater has lost its patron saint.”

Albee, in London for rehearsals of the British premiere of his “The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?” also issued a statement: “Uta Hagen was a great teacher, a great actress and a great cook. Also, she was nobody’s fool and I admired and cared for her deeply.”

William Carden, a former student of Hagen, worked closely with the actress and directed her in all the shows she did in the home stretch of her career, starting in 1995.

“No single person has had the impact on the quality of acting in this country that she has had, as an actor, as a teacher and as an author,” he told The Times on Thursday. “She understood and codified the process of acting as no one else has.”

Born in Gottingen, Germany, Hagen came to America as a small girl when her father, a musicologist and art history professor, took a post at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In 1936, the famed actress-director Eva Le Gallienne was preparing to play the prince in “Hamlet” in a production in Massachusetts. Hagen won the part of Ophelia. In 1938 she made her Broadway debut, playing Nina, the aspiring actress in Chekhov’s “The Sea Gull,” in a production that starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

She married Jose Ferrer the same year, and they often performed together during their 10-year marriage which ended in divorce, including a fabled Broadway production of “Othello” in 1943-44 in which Hagen played Desdemona opposite Ferrer’s Iago and Paul Robeson’s Moor. In a 1996 interview with the Washington Post, she said that her and Ferrer’s ties with Robeson, a firebrand for left-wing causes, brought them under suspicion of Communist-hunters such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Hagen told the Post that being tarred as politically suspect might have cut off possible opportunities in films.

“I’ve often said that McCarthy kept me pure. Commercially, I was hot in the early 1950s. I might have been tempted by Hollywood. I might have gotten lost in all that crap.”

Instead, teaching became a passion, starting in 1947 when she joined Berghof, who had launched his acting school in 1945. They were married from 1951 until his death in 1990.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” came along in 1962, and with it, Hagen won her second best-actress Tony, having her first in 1951 for Clifford Odets’ drama “The Country Girl.” In 1999, she won her third Tony, a lifetime special achievement award.

Hagen did not make her film debut until 1972, in “The Other.” Supporting roles followed in “The Boys from Brazil” (1978) and as Maria, the suspicious maid of Sunny Von Bulow, in “Reversal of Fortune” (1990).

Hard work and painstaking preparation were the hallmarks of Hagen’s acting, said Carden, who directed her in “Mrs. Klein,” “Collected Stories” and two acclaimed one-night staged readings in New York City and Los Angeles of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Nearing 81 in April 2000, she played Martha one last time on the stage of the Ahmanson Theatre -- a performance that Michael Phillips, then the theater critic for the Los Angeles Times, described as “wonderfully brave, unerringly specific and altogether inspiring.”

“She would work for months before rehearsal,” Carden said. “She never came to a rehearsal without having done [preparatory] work specifically for that rehearsal. She loved acting more than anyone I ever worked with.”

Hagen thought there was no mystery to good acting technique.

She laid out the essentials in six steps, urging actors to ask themselves a series of basic questions about their characters, such as “Who am I?” “What are my relationships?” “What do I want?” and “What are my obstacles?”

At the same time, she saw acting as an endless challenge. “Nobody ever learns how,” she told The Times in 2001 during the run of “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.” “The search for human behavior is infinite. You’ll never understand it all. I think that’s wonderful.”

Hagen’s insistence on hard work was reflected in a story she told the Washington Post about a conversation with Albee while he was working on his play “Tiny Alice” in the 1960s.

“He told me with great hilarity that they were going to go into rehearsals the next day and he hadn’t completed the last act. I said, ‘You think that’s funny? I think that’s amateur.’ ”

Actor-director Charles Nelson Reilly studied with Hagen for nine years, starting in 1950, then taught at HB Studio for years after that. “Miss Hagen would criticize and criticize, and you would want to drop dead,” he recalled Thursday. “And one day she would say, ‘No criticism,’ and you didn’t have to touch the ground when you went out into the street. ‘No criticism’ was her biggest praise. She cared about people and she labored to make us better craftsmen. What we got with that woman we took all along the road.”

One night during “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” Hagen fell off the Geffen Playhouse stage, a drop of about 3 feet, producing director Gilbert Cates recalled. “She wanted to go back on, but [managing director] Stephen Eich insisted that the show stop so she could be checked at the UCLA hospital across the street. She had a lot of bruises, but she went on the next day. She was an indomitable spirit.”

Hagen’s final moment in the public eye came last March, when President Bush awarded her a National Medal of the Arts at the White House.

“It was a wonderful, gala event, the last big event she went to, and she had a ball,” said her daughter, Ferrer. Her decline began several months ago, leaving her bedridden.

“At times she would fantasize she was on tour,” Ferrer added. “I think that was a saving grace, keeping her in a happy place. I think that was her way of coping with her situation and trying to make it as bearable as possible.”

Hagen is survived by her daughter, of New York City, a granddaughter and an infant great-granddaughter. Ferrer said Hagen’s body was cremated Thursday without a funeral, in keeping with her wishes.

“There will be a memorial at some point,” the daughter said. “It better be a big theater.”

*

Times staff writer Don Shirley contributed to this report.