![]() ![]() Though she demanded respect, she eschewed pretension. There was a balance in her approach, which was method acting, but not taken to the self-immolating extremes of some of its practitioners. Yet there was practicality in her approach she believed that audiences were collaborators, and closely followed performers, such as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, to develop the illusion of speaking viewers as individuals. If one was dedicated to making the world a better place through art, she believed, the art must be practised frequently and publicly. ![]() Hagan believed acting had a social responsibility, and that the artist should be cultivated and widely educated. That was also an expression of her sense of artistic morality, even if the result kept her off the stage. Her refusal to take part in the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s led to her own blacklisting. Her marriage to Ferrer ended in 1948, and three years later she married Herbert Berghof, with whom she ran the HB Studios. After a term at Rada, in 1937 she played Ophelia in the Eva Le Gallienne production of Hamlet, in Massachusetts. She attended high school and university in Madison, Wisconsin, and made her stage debut at 17, playing Sorrel in Noel Coward's Hay Fever. The daughter of an opera singer and an art history professor, Hagen was born in Göttingen, Germany, and moved to the US with her family at the age of seven. She met José Ferrer, whom she married in 1938, when starring in The Latitude Of Love and Angel Street. But she came to be more identified with contemporary playwrights she was Georgie, in Clifford Odets's The Country Girl, and followed Jessica Tandy into the role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. From 1942 to 1945, she played Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson, in runs of Othello, with José Ferrer as Iago. Her Broadway debut in 1938 was as Nina, with Alfred Lunt and Lyn Fontanne in Chekhov's The Seagull. Hagen identified herself as a presentational actor attempting, as she wrote, "to reveal human behaviour through himself, through an understanding of himself and consequently understanding the character he is portraying". ![]()
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