This video includes several clips highlighting Willem Dafoe’s performance in a 1973 UWM student production of “Phaedra.”
The footage was provided by Corliss Phillabaum, emeritus professor of theater at UWM, who directed the play.
Dafoe was so good, Phillabaum recalled, that a French professor told him that Dafoe’s performance as Hippolytus in “Phaedra” had totally changed his interpretation of that classic play, which the professor thought he knew well. “That was testimony that there was something really special about him,” Phillabaum said of Dafoe.
