[Subsection]

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 an artist and an academic, teaching, lecturing, and authoring scholarly texts on art history; composing music; and serving as organizer and chief director of the Goettingen Handel festivals in Germany. Dr. Hagen was brought here to establish the UW-Madison art history department, which he served as chairman for twenty-

two years. His devotion to his work and the arts was absolute and inexhaustible. Uta Hagen's mother, Thyra Amalie Hagen, a native of Flensburg, Germany, was a renowned 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 took 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 many years later.

Being part of such a gifted, charismatic family inevitably set Hagen somewhat apart from her peers.

"I never stopped being strange to my schoolmates," Hagen recalled in the aforementioned New York Times Magazine piece. "I played the piano, my father played the violin, and my mother didn't play bridge. It was an insuperable chasm."

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 its 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 was clearly her calling. In her senior year annual, the largely ironic "Vocational Placement Record" soberly predicted "Professional Actress" for Hagen. 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 Cardinal reviewer staidly put it before speculating, presciently, that the young actress would "someday reach the heights."

Such summer stock productions as Noel 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 the chance to fulfill her classmates' lofty predictions. In 1937, after only one semester, Hagen left for New York.

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

  [p. 23]