Background
Born in Chicago, Illinois, to professional ballroom dancers, Haakon Olaf Hagen and the former Marvel Lucile Wadsworth. When Haakon Hagen deserted his family, young Hagen was reared by his mother, grandmother, and aunts. As a 15-year-old, he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where one of his aunts had taken a teaching job. His family returned to Chicago, but he spent a year in law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, after having attended Oregon State University in Corvallis and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, from which he had received a degree in International Relations. Subsequently employed by the U.S. State Department in West Germany (since Germany), he then served a two-year stint in the United States Navy. For a time he taught ballroom dancing, the specialty of his parents, for the Arthur Murray Company. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, he tried acting. He was spotted in a production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and given a guest-starring role on the classic 1950s police series Dragnet, starring Jack Webb.
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Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)