Marcia Haufrecht

Early life

Haufrecht was the first of three children born to Herbert and Judith Haufreucht, the former a noted pianist, composer, folklorist and editor. A Manahattan native, born and bred, Ms. Haufrecht attended Performing Arts High School, graduating in 1954 as a dancer.

Dance

High school diploma notwithstanding, Broadway was scarcely clamoring for "a barefoot, modern dancer" (Haufrecht's own words), much less for one of Ms. Haufrecht's diminutive stature and limited experience. That being said, she made her Off-Broadway debut as an actress that September at the Cherry Lane Theatre, with a small part in the Studio 12 limited-run revival of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies. Moreover, undersized or not, Haufrecht nonetheless secured both her Broadway and her professional dancing debuts just two months later, becoming one of the final group of dancers engaged for the new musical, Plain and Fancy. For this, she had the show's choreographer, Helen Tamiris, to thank; a former colleague of Haufrecht's father, Tamiris fought hard for her inclusion in the show.

While deferring to their choreographer on this particular casting decision, the show's producers stood firm on the matter of billing. If they could not lengthen the dancer, nor her résumé, then they could and would shorten and Americanize her name; by the time of the show's opening in January 1955, Haufrecht had, for public consumption, become Howard, and so she would remain for at least six years.

In the summer of 1955, Haufrecht's Broadway debut was followed by a national tour with Can-Can, owing in large part – as she would confide in a 2012 interview – to the casting call's fortuitous timing:

I think the only reason they hired me was because it was in the dead of summer, and the only people that showed up to the audition were strippers; they weren't really dancers. So they had to hire me; I was the only dancer that showed up.

Nonetheless, well before her 20th birthday, Haufrecht had already turned her attention to acting, as she told The Montreal Gazette in 1969, "because I hated being part of the background. I felt so superfluous. And I felt I had something to say... It was my ego."

Speaking in 2012, Haufrecht concedes that her early career change, however rewarding in the long run, was basically a pragmatic choice, born of necessity:

After I was done with Can-Can, I auditioned for a lot of shows, and I couldn't get anything... One day, I auditioned - I don't know if it was Damn Yankees - [but] it was a Bob Fosse show. And I'm down to the last fifteen and he needed twelve, or something like that. He pulls me aside and says, "I'd love to use you, Marcia. You're a wonderful dancer, you really are. But you're too short." I said to myself, "That's it; I'm outta here. I'm not dancing anymore."

Acting

Within a year or so, Haufrecht was working with Nola Chilton, an influential New York-based acting teacher and director. Haufrecht studied with Chilton for approximately four years, culminating in her participation in an Off-Broadway revival of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, staged by Chilton and boasting a 45-member cast; aside from Haufrecht, it featured such promising unknowns as Ken Kercheval, Jerry Ragni, 'Dusty' Hoffman, and Ron Leibman. Despite an extremely favorable review from Village Voice critic Michael Smith, praising both performance (including Haufrecht's "spectacularly destroyed whore") and production, dissatisfaction with her own contribution, and with the quality of her work in general as well as her perceived lack of progress, led Haufrecht to seriously contemplate giving up acting altogether. Quickly dissuaded by her colleagues, Leibman in particular, Haufrecht followed the latter's advice and joined him at The Actors Studio to meet with Studio director Lee Strasberg. Allowed to sit in on sessions on an interim basis, Haufrecht eventually earned her full membership via audition.

A member of the Studio since at least 1964, Haufrecht is now a seasoned veteran of stage and screen, in roles ranging from White Cargo's exotic femme fatale, Tondeleyo (her final appearance as Marcia Howard), to Richard III's eloquent nemesis, Queen Elizabeth, opposite Al Pacino (in the first of Pacino's three Richard's). She has performed at Lincoln Center, La MaMa, The Public Theater, with The Ensemble Studio Theatre, Center Stage in Baltimore, at the Adelphi Festival Theatre in Garden City, The Open Stage in Sarasota, in Montreal at Place des Arts, and in Berlin at the Friends of the Opera Theatre. Haufrecht's film appearances have, in recent years, included The Producers, The Night Listener, Anamorph, and Win Win; on TV, she has been seen in The Sopranos, as well as Law & Order, Law and Order: SVU, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

In April 2001, more than 20 years after its first and only production, Tennessee Williams' Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? received its New York premiere, courtesy of Haufrecht's Common Basis Theatre, with the artistic director herself heading the cast. As Daily News critic Howard Kissel noted, "The play's heady combination of black humor and poetry is best handled by Marcia Haufrecht, as the woman pining for her former boarder." Ken Jaworski of Off-Off-Broadway Review added:

As Louise McBride, Marcia Haufrecht was exquisite: a frail woman struggling to appear strong, an aging southern belle masking loneliness behind false laughter. "Even in a dream one can suffer," Louise claims. Haufrecht embodied the premise, projecting a drowsy, fatigued lonesomeness with each action and word.

The previous month, Haufrecht had garnered even stronger praise from Off-Off-Broadway Review's Doug DeVita as Common Basis staged another, less heralded premiere, Grace Cavalieri's Pinecrest Rest Haven:

A frail-looking woman, her white hair tied up in a simple purple ribbon, enters a peach-and-white nursing-home waiting room and plaintively asks if anyone has seen her husband. The question, asked with a heartbreaking, bewildered innocence by the haunting Marcia Haufrecht, is a startlingly lucid depiction of the loss of clarity that can come with advanced age... the one thing this production had going for it was the presence of Haufrecht, who effortlessly rose above the obvious material and gave a luminous, moving performance of concise truth... As the late, great Madeline Kahn once said about her own work: "I have appeared in crap, but I have never treated it as such. Never." Haufrecht obviously goes by that same standard, and her performance displayed a level of professionalism that most actors would do well to emulate.

Writing

From a playwright whose initial motivation had simply been to provide – at a director/colleague's request – an interesting acting vehicle for herself, Haufrecht's plays have been produced in New York City by Common Basis Theatre, The Ensemble Studio Theatre, and The Actors Studio, and, in upstate New York, by Performing Arts of Woodstock. Around the country, her work has been performed in Texas, Florida, in San Francisco, and, in Southern California, by Company of Angels and CSU Fullerton. Abroad, her plays have been staged in New Zealand, Australia at La Mama in Melbourne, and at the Kultur im Gugg in Austria.

Directing

As a director, Haufrecht has staged both original works and revivals at The Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Actors Studio, The Barrow Street Theatre, The Common Basis Theatre, and in Australia, Portugal, and Austria .

Teaching

A student of Lee Strasberg from the early 1960s until his death, Haufrecht taught at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute for five years; later, she worked for two years as an adjunct professor in Columbia University's graduate film program. Haufrecht has taught and coached privately for over thirty years; her students include Ellen Barkin, Alec Baldwin, Uma Thurman, Janine Turner, John Leguizamo, Debi Mazar, Loren Dean, David Duchovny, Ian Buchanan, and Harvey Keitel. She taught for several years in Australia, and in Austria; more recently, she has taught, and continues to teach, in Lisbon, Portugal, since the mid-1990s. In New York, Haufrecht was on the faculty of The Actors Studio MFA program at The New School for Social Research (where Haufrecht would remain when the MFA program departed for Pace University in 2006, staying there until her retirement in 2011).

Theatre (partial listing)

These are acting credits except where otherwise indicated.