Noted stage actress who has also done limited work in TV and film. Born in Germany and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Her Broadway debut was in `The Seagull` in 1938. She won her first Tony (and other awards) in 1950 for Clifford Odets `The Country Girl`. Her second Tony was for the role of Martha in Edward Albee`s `Who`s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?`. She later became a highly influential acting teacher at New York`s HB Studio (founded by Herbert Berghof in 1945) and authored best-selling acting texts, Respect for Acting, with Haskel Frankel, and A Challenge for the Actor. Her most substantial contributions to theater pedagogy were a series of `object exercises` that built on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and Yevgeni Vakhtangov. She was elected to the American Theatre 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.
