Jack Hofsiss, a director who won a Tony Award in his first outing on Broadway for “The Elephant Man” and who kept working despite an accident that left him without the use of his arms and legs, died Sept. 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 65.
Mr. Hofsiss also directed several TV films, including a 1982 adaptation of “The Elephant Man,” a version of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” starring Jessica Lange, and “The Oldest Living Graduate” with Henry Fonda.
He was best known for shepherding “The Elephant Man” to Broadway from off-Broadway in 1979. At 28, he became the youngest person to win a Tony Award for best direction. He also won the Drama Desk Award.
The play was based on the actual case history of Joseph Merrick, a Victorian-era freak-show outcast whom a London surgeon, Frederick Treves, protected and encouraged. Philip Anglim portrayed Merrick, referred to as John in the play, without the aid of makeup or special costuming.
McCann, who produced the play, called Mr. Hofsiss a gregarious and witty man and said she considered him the smartest director she ever worked with.
His career was interrupted on July 20, 1985, when he dived into the shallow end of a Fire Island swimming pool and broke his neck. He ended up in hospitals for nearly eight months.
“You spend a lot of time figuring out how you might get rid of yourself. Suicide becomes a very strong possibility. A release,” he told the Associated Press in 1986. “I never got to the methodology, though. I only got as far as the fantasy.”
The support of his family, his show business colleagues and the offer of a job helped Mr. Hofsiss adjust. The job offer from Josephine Abady, artistic director of the Berkshire Theater Festival, was to direct Philip Barry’s “Paris Bound.”
The accident made Mr. Hofsiss confront his physical limitations as a director.
“Not being able to jump up and get in the middle of things forced me to be more articulate,” he said. “Now I have an assistant who jumps up and shoves people around instead of me.”
His disability “didn’t stop him,” McCann said. “He went every place he could. He went to the theater all the time.”
John Bernard Hofsiss was born Sept. 28, 1950, in Brooklyn. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1971 and then moved to New York. He parlayed a job in the casting department at the New York Shakespeare Festival into several directing assignments, including work at the Public Theater, the New York City Opera and the television soap opera “Another World.”
He made his movie-directing debut in 1982 with “I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can,” which starred Jill Clayburgh.
After the accident, Mr. Hofsiss directed “The Shadow Box” on Broadway in 1994, starring Estelle Parsons and Mercedes Ruehl, and such off-Broadway productions as “James Joyce’s The Dead” in 1999,” “Surviving Grace” in 2002 and “Confessions of a Mormon Boy” in 2006.
Mr. Hofsiss also served as a Tony Award nominator and on the board of directors of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, which advocates for artists with disabilities and artists of color.
Survivors include three sisters.
Read more Washington Post obituaries
