AS BEFITS A DIVA, UTA HAGEN COMMANDS the couch of her sprawling Greenwich Village apartment, a cigarette in her hand, a toy poodle named GB (for George Bernard Shaw) on her lap. But don't be misled. Hagen, starring in the Off-Broadway smash Mrs. Klein, turns out to be no prima donna but a gutsy pragmatist. When asked what kept her from the stage for 10 years, she replies, "I'm 76. How many parts are there for old ladies?"

The answer is, not nearly enough when it comes to a theatrical treasure like Hagen. Arguably America's greatest living stage actress, she has breathed life into a skein of memorable roles: Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson's Othello in 1943, Georgie in The Country Girl in 1950 (winning her first Best Actress Tony) and Martha in 1962's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (winning a second Tony).

Some also regard Hagen as the quintessential drama teacher. For 49 years, students including Christine Lahti, Whoopi Goldberg and Matthew Broderick have packed her classes at the HB Studio (founded by her late husband Herbert Berghof) and studied her several books on acting. Former pupil Jack Lemmon claims Hagen taught him the "truth about character behavior." Says Hagen: "I try to teach actors to bring a human being onstage, not an actor."

It is this humanity that infuses her role in Mrs. Klein. The play, set in 1934, dramatizes the German-born child psychologist Melanie Klein's tense relationship with her daughter, a rival analyst. When it played in London with another actress in the title role, says Hagen, "everybody who saw it said, 'This part is written for you.' I don't know how to take that because Melanie Klein is a monster. She has fantastic ideas [but] makes the most primitive human mistakes over and over." Hagen, as Klein, rarely errs. "[She] strikes enough sparks," wrote New York Times critic Ben Brantley, "to turn a pedestrian text into a theatrical bonfire."

Hagen's own story began placidly enough in the university town of Gottingen, Germany. But when she was 6, her father, Oskar, an art history professor, accepted a job at the University of Wisconsin, uprooting Uta, her older brother Holger and her Danish mother, Thyra, an opera singer. On a trip back to Germany at age 9, she saw actress Elisabeth Bergner in St. Joan and fell for the magic of theater. At 16, Uta enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London but disapproved of the RADA teaching style and left after four months. At 17, she wrote actress Eva LeGallienne asking to join her company. Hagen was granted an audition, and was cast as Ophelia in LeGallienne's 1937 Hamlet. "Isn't it unreal?" says Hagen laughing. "But it's true."

The next year she played in summer stock opposite José Ferrer. "He taught me how to box [for my role]," Hagen recalls. "One night onstage, I got under his chin, and there was a deep clack." She knocked him out, and in more ways than one. They wed six months later. "We were children," says Hagen, who was a mere 20 when daughter Letty was born. "That's my excuse for what a rotten mother I was. I was selfish with my career and expected too much of her." As for the marriage, it "disintegrated fast," she admits. "To this day I don't like Spanish food."

The Ferrers separated in 1946. The next year, Hagen costarred with Berghof, an actor and teacher who had fled Vienna during World War II, in The Whole World Over. During a love scene, says Hagen, "we started kissing. A week later we hit the sack and never got out of it. He was something! He was the miracle of my life."

Berghof persuaded Hagen to teach at his studio. He was also like a father to Letty. "At times my mother and I got into arguments that were doozies," says Letty, now 55 and an actress. "He saved the day."

By the 1950s, Hagen's problems with Letty were overshadowed by her troubles with the Hollywood blacklist. Because of her liberal views, and an early affair with Robeson, her passport was confiscated, the FBI spied on her and she could not get TV or film work. "It was a time when I might've been tempted to do movies," she says. "The blacklist saved my integrity."

It wasn't until 1972 that Hagen appeared onscreen—in the horrific thriller The Other (followed by 1978's The Boys from Brazil and Reversal of Fortune in 1990)—and she did so only for the money, she insists. In the post-blacklist years, she starred onstage in such classics as The Cherry Orchard, taught and wrote books (including a 1983 autobiography, Sources). Berghof died of heart failure in 1990, but Hagen remains committed to their studio. And her eighth decade is working out fine. "This is like a dream," Hagen says of Mrs. Klein. As for retirement, she is brusquely dismissive. "To do what?" she asks. "Sit around? If I had my way, I'd be onstage all the time."

MARJORIE ROSEN
TOBY KAHN in New York City