Uta Hagen

Uta Hagen was a German-American actress and theatre practitioner who originated the role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, who called her "a profoundly truthful actress." She was also a highly influential acting teacher at New York's Herbert Berghof Studio and authored best-selling acting texts, Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor. Her most substantial contributions to theatre pedagogy were a series of "object exercises" that built on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and Yevgeny Vakhtangov. She was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1981. She twice won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999. She was also awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2003. She died of a stroke at her Manhattan home in 2004 at the age of 84. She is buried in Abingdon Square Park, near the HB Studio where she taught for many years.