About the Author

Uta Hagen (1919-2004) was a German American actress and theatre practitioner who made her Broadway debut in 1938. She starred in over twenty Broadway productions, including Othello, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The recipient of the National Medal of Honor for the Arts in 2003 and winner of three Tony Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, Hagen taught for over forty years at the HB Studio in New York and was one of the most renowned and respected acting teachers of the 20th century.

Reviews

Praise for Uta Hagen
"This fascinating and detailed book about acting is Miss Hagen's credo, the accumulated wisdom of her years spent in intimate communion with her art. It is at once the voicing of her exacting standards for herself and those she teaches, and an explanation of the means to the end. For those unable to avail themselves of her personal tutelage, her book is the best substitute." --Publishers Weekly "Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting is not only pitched on a high artistic level but also full of homely, practical information by a superb craftswoman. An illuminating discussion of the standards and techniques of enlightened stage acting." --Brooks Atkinson "Hagen adds to the large corpus of titles on acting with vivid dicta drawn from experience, skill, and a sense of personal and professional worth, Her principal asset in this treatment is her truly significant imagination. Her "object exercises" display a wealth of detail with which to stimulate the student preparing a scene for presentation." --Library Journal "Respect for Acting is a simple, lucid, and sympathetic statement of actors problems in the theatre and basic tenets for their training wrought from the personal experience of a fine actress and teacher of acting." --Harold Clurman "Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her." --Fritz Weaver