John Uecker (8 June 1946 - 24 April 2022) was an American actor and theatre director, who is best known for his work with the writers

James Purdy James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 March 13, 2009) was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work ha ...

and

Tennessee Williams Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the thre ...

Early career

Uecker studied with

Sanford Meisner Sanford Meisner (August 31, 1905 – February 2, 1997) was an American actor and acting teacher who developed an approach to acting instruction that is now known as the Meisner technique. While Meisner was exposed to method acting at the Group ...

, Mira Rostova, and

Kim Stanley Kim Stanley (born Patricia Kimberley Reid; February 11, 1925 – August 20, 2001) was an American actress, primarily in television and theatre, but with occasional film performances. She began her acting career in theatre, and subsequently at ...

. He also was an assistant to Harold Clurman at the

Actors Studio The Actors Studio is a membership organization for professional actors, theatre directors and playwrights at 432 West 44th Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded ...

in the Playwrights and Directors Unit. His associations with the Actors Studio and Meisner led to roles in several plays directed by Method and Meisner teachers, including

William Alderson William Maddison Alderson (7 May 1814 – 21 April 1884) was an English-born Australian politician. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne to William Henry Alderson and Barbara Maddison. He worked in the leather trade, and in 1835 married Isabel ...

and William Esper. He made his Broadway debut in ''The November People'' in 1978 and began working in downtown New York City. During this time, he briefly lived with

Candy Darling Candy Darling (November 24, 1944 – March 21, 1974) was an American actress, best known as a Warhol superstar and transgender A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not ...

and started to work with

Tennessee Williams

attended a workshop of several

stories adapted by Uecker and hired him as a general assistant and intermittent editor. Uecker assisted Williams in the writing of many of his later one-act plays, including ''The Chalky White Substance'', which was dedicated to Purdy. Uecker later directed the premiere of ''The Chalky White Substance'', pairing the short play with ''The Travelling Companion'' under the collective title ''Williams Guignol''. Uecker was sleeping in the adjoining room on the night that Williams died.

Mr. Williams's body was found Friday morning by his secretary, John Uecker, who shared the playwright's two-room suite. Mr. Uecker said he had heard a noise in Mr. Williams's room at about 11 P.M on Thursday, but did not investigate. At about 10:45 A.M. Friday, Mr. Uecker entered the room and found Mr. Williams lying next to his bed.

Williams' sudden death has continued to haunt Uecker, who has faced accusations of negligence and even murder. Speaking to CBS New York, on the 30th anniversary of the playwright's death, CUNY Professor Annette J. Saddik said Williams had been taking Seconal – a barbiturate derivative – to help him sleep, and also had been drinking the night he died.

“When this happened, John Uecker, who was his companion and assistant at the time, was still around and told the (New York City) Medical Examiner, ‘Look, people are going to think it’s suicide or AIDS or something bizarre and we don’t know what happened,’” Saddik said in the interview. “So the Medical Examiner, said, ‘OK, he choked on a bottle cap.’ But really, his body just gave up and the eventual diagnosis was intolerance.”

Uecker was hired by the Executors of the Williams' Estate ( Southeast Banking Corporation and John Eastman), for the purpose of cataloguing, authenticating and preserving Mr. Williams' later work because of Uecker's extensive and first-hand knowledge of the genesis of Mr. Williams' later manuscripts. In 2010, Uecker spoke at the grand opening of the newly renovated Tennessee Williams Welcome Center in downtown Columbus, Mississippi.

James Purdy

After Williams died, Uecker became more involved as general and literary assistant to

. Uecker had already been adapting and acting in Purdy's short pieces. From the late 1980s, he began directing Purdy's plays produced by Victoria Linchong. Their first collaboration was on the production of two of Purdy's short plays ''Heatstroke'' and ''Souvenir'' under the collective title ''Sun of the Sleepless'', featuring Laurence Fishburne and

Sheila Dabney Sheila Dabney is an American actor, best known for her co-starring role in the 1987 lesbian feminist film ''She Must Be Seeing Things'' alongside Lois Weaver and directed by Sheila McLaughlin. In 1984, Dabney won an Obie Award for her performanc ...

. Other credits include the full-length plays ''The Rivalry of Dolls'' and ''Foment''. Uecker and Linchong later founded a theater company to produce the work of Purdy. Uecker collaborated with Purdy on a large-scale, substantive edit of "Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue". Uecker also was associated with the creative development and substantive editing of the last two publications of Purdy's lifetime, "Moe's Villa and Other Stories", a collection of 13 Purdy short-stories, and "Selected Plays", a collection of 4 full-length plays for which Uecker wrote the introduction. The relationship with Purdy produced 9 full-length plays, 30 short plays, as well as a novel and a book of short stories. Uecker brought the mainstream press' attention back to Purdy by helping to land a lifetime retrospective review of Purdy's work in the

New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

. The result was a long essay by Gore Vidal, who framed Purdy's as "the outlaw of American fiction" and praised him as "an authentic American genius."

Other work

For eight years in New York City, Uecker taught a fusion of the Meisner technique and Method acting, which had been synthesized in exercises developed and taught by the actress

. Uecker coached and/or directed James Gandolfini, Holly Hunter, Brett Butler Laurence Fishburne, Melissa Gilbert, Sam Trammell, and Jason Hale.

References

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42196233@N07/sets/72157624984066036/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Uecker, John Living people American male actors 1946 births