In 1979, at the age of 28, Jack Hofsiss was the youngest director to ever win the Tony Award for his brilliant direction of Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man.” Handsome, talented and charismatic, the young man was then one of the most sought-after of artists, going on to direct Jill Clayburgh in the acclaimed film “I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can.” But the director’s fast-track career was derailed when in 1985, he had an accident that would leave him paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life.When Hofsiss died on September 13, at the age of 65, he was remembered by friends and associates as a man who faced his tragic circumstance with spiritual grace and indomitable patience.“I never once saw him lose his temper, nothing ever got to him,” says Elizabeth McCann, one of the producers of “The Elephant Man” and a longtime friend. “He was a brilliant and gracious man who only wanted to work and that terrible accident was a great loss to him but also to the theater.”Raised in New York City and a graduate of Georgetown University, Hofsiss once quipped that being an altar boy was his first glimpse of the magic of theater. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the accident - caused when he was diving into a swimming pool - he refused to have conversations with the doctors of its after effects because, as he told People magazine, “I’m in show business. I don’t want reality.”Informed of his disabilities, Hofsiss then went into a near-suicidal depression caused by the fear that he’d never work again. But he was wrenched out of his self-pity by friends who had themselves endured near-crippling accidents. Those included actresses Ann-Margret, who had suffered a terrifying fall during a Las Vegas rehearsal, and Eileen Brennan, who was struck by car. He dubbed them the “Great Disaster Divas.”The director recalled: “Just the fact that they were standing at the end of the bed - and my knowing they both were back working to the highest of their capabilities - was a great inspiration.”Five months into his rehabilitation at the Rusk Institute, Hofsiss received an offer from artistic director Josephine Abady to direct a production of Tad Mosel’s “All the Way” at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. At the beginning of rehearsals, Hofsiss was scared; the actors were wary. But after he acknowledged the elephant in the room - “Look, I’m not fragile” - the company got to work on the revival which was well-received.Hofsiss continued to work in the succeeding decades, mostly off-Broadway though he returned to Broadway in 1994 to direct Michael Cristopher’s “Shadow Box.”At the time of the accident, Hofsiss said that he took solace through Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”: “It helped me realize that I had to stop asking the ‘why’ questions. There are no answers and they prevent you from moving on.”He became less judgmental, especially of friends who’d abandoned him after the accident--“They don’t know what’s going on inside of me and I realized I don’t know what’s going on inside of them”--and he no longer lived for the praise and material wealth that had once fueled his ambition. He told People magazine: “My happiness is within now, based upon what I’m doing and my own self-satisfaction. I’m capable of making myself much happier now than I ever was before.”
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