Frances Sternhagen Is Coming to 1st Stage

Celebrated actress and two-time Tony Award-winner Frances Sternhagen will be joining the confluence of artists and audiences for Florida Stage’s 5^th Annual 1^st Stage New Works Festival. Ms. Sternhagen will be featured in a staged reading of legendary playwright Israel Horovitz’ new play Beverley on Saturday, February 5, 2011.  On Friday, February 4, in place of the Festival’s usual Keynote speech, Ms. Sternhagen will take part in what is being called “A Conversation with Frances Sternhagen.”  Florida Stage Producing Director Louis Tyrrell will conduct a public interview with Sternhagen on stage in the Persson Hall at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. The Florida Stage 1^st Stage New Works Festival takes place February 3-6, 2011. Tickets and packages for all Festival events are available online at www.floridastage.org or by calling the box office at (561) 585-3433.  Interviews with Ms. Sternhagen, Mr. Horovitz and all Festival participants are available. Contact Michael Gepner, mgepner@floridastage.org, (561) 515-6372.

Sternhagen has won two Tony Awards, one for “Best Supporting Actress (Dramatic)” in 1974 for the original Broadway production of Neil Simon's The Good Doctor based on Chekhov stories (which also won her a Drama Desk Award for “Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play”); and the second in 1995 for the revival of The Heiress, based on the Henry James novella. She has been nominated for Tony Awards five additional times, including for her roles in the original Broadway casts of Equus (1975) and On Golden Pond (1979), as well as for Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1972), the musical Angel (1978) which was based on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, and the 2002 revival of Paul Osborne's Morning’s at Seven.

Sternhagen made her film debut in 1967's New York City high school drama Up the Down Staircase, which starred Sandy Dennis. She has worked periodically in Hollywood since then. She had character roles in the 1971 Paddy Chayefsky's classic The Hospital, Two People (1973), and Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978). She appeared in Starting Over (1979) which starred Burt Reynolds; with Sean Connery in Outland (1981); and with Michael J. Fox in Bright Lights, Big City (1988). She played Farrah Fawcett's mother in See You in the Morning (1989), Richard Farnsworth's wife in Misery (1990), and John Lithgow's psychiatrist in Raising Cain (1992). Sternhagen starred in Frank Darabont's suspense thriller The Mist in 2007.

She may be best known to TV audiences as Esther Clavin, mother of John Ratzenberger's Boston postman character Cliff Clavin, on the long-running series Cheers, for which she received two Emmy Award nominations. She also played Bunny MacDougal, mother of Trey, Charlotte's first husband on Sex and the City (another Emmy Award nomination).

In 2006, she guest-starred on TV's The Closer, playing Willie Ray Johnson, the supportive mother of lead character Brenda (played by Kyra Sedgwick. Sternhagen has appeared on twelve episodes of The Closer to date.

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