Extraordinary Artists Lead the Way

The School of Dramatic Arts honors five inspiring alumni who have made a difference in the dramatic arts through their commitment, artistry and engagement.

Extraordinary Trojans

Forest Whitaker ’82 Michele Dedeaux Engemann BA ’68 Donald Webber Jr. BFA ’08

Greg Holford BA ’80, MFA ’82 Grant Heslov BFA ’86

Watch the awardees’ acceptance speeches and tribute videos at dramaticarts.usc.edu/ 12 USC CALLBOARD callboard21

Forest Whitaker ’82

AS BOTH AN OSCAR-WINNER and a UNESCO Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation, Forest Whitaker ’82 has long combined a keen eye for observation with a heart for humanity. He credits his mother for each of those traits, which draw from the same well — one filled with empathy.

Whitaker’s mother, Laura Francis Smith, graduated from USC with degrees in special education and psychology, then became a teacher for children with disabilities. His mother’s relentless curiosity and compassion for others opened Whitaker’s mind to new worlds. “My mother showed me that life existed outside the conflicts and problems of my neighborhood,” he says.

Whitaker himself took a more circuitous route to his calling. He began his college career at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, on a football scholarship. After a serious back injury, he dropped football and switched his major to music. Soon, he became intrigued with opera and transferred to USC to study classical voice.

“As I walked around campus that first year, I felt a tremendous sense of opportunity and possibility,” Whitaker says. Indeed, as his mother taught him, he remained open to possibilities unseen. After being accepted into both USC’s musical and acting conservatories, he chose to change routes once again, this time to drama.

At USC, Whitaker learned a powerful lesson that changed how he approached his new craft.

“The faculty here taught my classmates and me that while we existed as individuals, our greatest successes as artists would come from our capacity to channel our talents into the dynamics of an ensemble,” he says. “Our greatest artistry wasn’t going to be found in isolation.”

As he gained agency in the film industry, Whitaker began choosing his films and characters based on the opportunity to highlight social justice issues or help expand consciousness — his own, as well as others’.

“Throughout the four decades since my career began, film has been a way for me to continue my search to understand the intricacies of mankind and how I’m linked to humanity…” Whitaker says. “What I couldn’t have known, when I was leaving USC, was that assuming many different types of characters would let me open a door to let others take a peek at the joys, angers, and pains from both myself and throughout humanity, and use those experiences to illuminate their own lives.”

Today, Whitaker is widely recognized as one of the greatest actors of his generation — perhaps best known for his performance in The Last King of Scotland, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role.

That same film provided a seminal life experience off-screen, too. In researching his role as dictator Idi Amin, Whitaker had the chance to talk with child soldiers in Uganda. “The emptiness in their eyes reminded me of my own friends who joined gangs,” Whitaker says. “It was violence seeking purpose…something shifted in me after that.”

In 2012, he founded the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI), which promotes peace, reconciliation and social development within communities long marked by violence and conflict. The WPDI offers hope and practical new paths forward for young women and men across the world and in the United States. That includes here in Southern California, where the WPDI is working with the School of Dramatic Arts’ Institute for Theatre & Social Change to develop plays with social justice themes for WPDI partner schools in Los Angeles.

This year, Whitaker received SDA’s Robert Redford Award for Engaged Artists for his exemplary quality, skill and innovation in his craft as a performer, as well as his public commitment to social responsibility.

He also continues to encourage rising artists at SDA and elsewhere to realize the impact they can make — beyond the stage or screen.

“Inside each of you there’s a divine spark,” Whitaker says. “It holds those you love, your beauty, and your purpose. Together, all of our sparks become a flame that can light up the world. You hold great power. From first-hand experience, I know the arts can amplify strength and resilience.

“I ask you to consider what sort of things you can do through your art or your life. Take a chance or a small step toward how you think our society can evolve into something greater.” 

Michele Dedeaux Engemann BA ’68

MICHELE DEDEAUX ENGEMANN BA ’68 didn’t intend to study theatre at USC. Her plan was to become a teacher. “Even though my mother said I was a very dramatic child, I don’t think she meant it as a career suggestion,” Engemann says with a laugh.

But she’d enjoyed the musicals she’d done in high school, and in her first year at USC, she was tempted enough to take a theatre class from John Blankenchip, legendary professor, director and theatre designer.

“He made me do this soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice,” Engemann recalls. “I broke down three times trying to do it. I wanted to leave. But he said, ‘No, no, no,’ and he had everyone stay until I did it. My classmates were so supportive.”

Eventually, she made it through the scene. The breakthrough sparked something in her.

“The thrill was doing it in front of my fellow students,” Engemann says. “I wanted to know how everyone else did it. How did they grasp what the part meant? How did they keep themselves calm? I started thinking, ‘What could I do if I dug down deep and really tried this?’ That intrigued me beyond anything else.”

The experience set her on a new course. Engemann has now spent 51 years as a member of the Nine O’Clock Players, the oldest children’s theatre company in Southern California. And she’s a longtime supporter of the Pasadena Playhouse, where she’s been an actor, volunteer and board president.

Thankfully for USC, Engemann has also remained a forever Trojan. Currently a trustee, she previously served as the founding chair of SDA’s Board of Councilors and played an instrumental role in establishing SDA as an independent school within the University. In recognition of this extraordinary and unwavering commitment to and support of the School, she received SDA’s Alumni Service Award in the fall.

Today, she and her husband Roger are helping raise funds to renovate the historic United University Church building as a new home for the School of Dramatic Arts.

“The whole idea is so thrilling,” Engemann says. “It will give us a true arts corridor along 34th Street with all the arts schools so close together. Then, USC Village is just across the street, so it will be easy for students to come over and watch something. Our SDA students will be establishing a whole new era of the dramatic arts at USC.”

Establishing something wholly new at SDA is something Engemann knows a little about, too. Back in 1966, Blankenchip — the professor who wouldn’t let her quit her first Shakespearean soliloquy — enlisted Engemann to join his fledgling Festival Theatre USCUSA. That same year the company, comprised of USC students and alumni, became the first university troupe to perform at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

Engemann traveled with the company three summers in a row, often performing four shows a day for three weeks straight. The company also performed in Amsterdam, Berlin and London.

“Being exposed to different cultures as a young person was amazing,” Engemann says. “And doing four shows a day, you learned a lot! The discipline, the camaraderie, the improv. Learning how to stay in the moment from show to show. That whole experience bonded me with the stage and with USC for life.”

Bonded, indeed. One year, during an Edinburgh show, she fell off the stage from a height of about eight feet. The fall broke her back, though she wouldn’t learn that until she finally went to a doctor two months later in Los Angeles. Until then, Engemann kept on performing.

“I spent the next six months in a lovely back brace,” she recalls, “but it was worth it!”

Suffice it to say, her dedication to the arts — and to USC — are beyond question.

“USC gave me such a gift,” Engemann says. “Theatre training has helped me as a person and allowed me to help others. I have a passion for it. I love everything about it. It’s not for everybody to be the director or the actor. But it is for everybody to go and experience it, to give it a try. It’s a life lesson. It’s creativity. It’s community. And I’m so grateful that I’ve gotten to be part of it.” 

BY PHILLIP JORDAN

Donald Webber Jr. BFA ’08

DONALD WEBBER JR. BFA ’08 recalls walking into his audition for the School of Dramatic Arts’ Bachelor of Fine Arts program and wondering how the experience could feel so familiar.

“I walked out of that room and I felt so good. I was like, ‘I really hope it’s me,’ ” he says. “It felt like home, you know? And then it was so easy once I got my acceptance letters; it was a no-brainer.”

All the other schools he had considered, he says, melted away. He was eager to work with Vice Dean Lori Ray Fisher and professor Jack Rowe, who had left a warm impression in the audition room.

“He understood how to make you feel good as an actor, no matter what you were doing. Jack was a great coach; he would root for you,” Webber remembers. “He helped me understand that this acting thing, it’s serious business, but it’s really fun.”

Webber is one of only a few actors to play both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in Hamilton, and has also performed with the show on Broadway and in the Puerto Rico engagement opposite LinManuel Miranda. He has also appeared on Broadway in Motown the Musical and Holler if Ya Hear Me, and off-Broadway in Whorl Inside a Loop. In the fall, he was recognized by the School with the Broadway Spotlight Award for his consistent and outstanding stage career. But the transition to having a stellar theatrical resume was not as simple as it may seem, especially for a performer as effusively charming as Webber.

“I thought I was going to graduate and get on a plane to New York City and go be on Broadway immediately. I think we all do,” he says.

Instead, he spent a few years after graduation auditioning while he taught drama at his high school, St. Bernard in Playa del Rey, where his beloved acting teacher had retired. Just out of college, he was excited to share the lessons he had learned from Rowe and so many other mentors at the School and beyond. A few years into teaching, as he cued the curtain to fall on his students’ last performance of the semester, Broadway called (he remembers seeing the 212 area code display on his phone). He flew to New York the next day for a Jersey Boys callback and ended up spending two years on tour with the show.

Now, as Burr and sometimes Hamilton, Webber has big shoes to fill. But he doesn’t aim to imitate other actors’ performances. In fact, his close friendship with the production’s original Burr — Leslie Odom Jr., who he met at USC — has taken some of the pressure off. Webber remembers a faculty member bringing in Odom, who was one of her clients, as a panelist when he and his class were preparing for their senior acting showcase. The pair immediately hit it off.

“We stayed connected. And so it was a lot easier to go see him play this role when they were off-Broadway,” he recalls. “That night, I told him, ‘This is it. This is your Tony.’ He was like, ‘Thank you, man. I’m working hard. I feel like I’m acting through the tips of my fingers.’ ”

Webber thinks more about ‘acting through the tips of his fingers’ than he does impersonating Odom’s Burr onstage.

Webber has carried this philosophy with him to the screen as well, from Marvel/Netflix’s Punisher to NBC’s The Wiz Live. Up next on his call sheet is Apple TV+ series Severance, directed by Ben Stiller, where he will act alongside Adam Scott, John Turturro and Patricia Arquette.

In the meantime, Hamilton is back on tour and performances are in full swing. Webber keeps his role fresh by remembering a bit of wisdom he picked up at SDA.

“I learned at USC that we are artists examining what it’s like to be human. We, literally, are just being human beings,” he says. “We happen to be on a stage and the lights are dimmed over there, and the spotlights are on us, but we’re just humans and at the end of the day, we’re showing the audience what it’s like.” 

BY CELINE KINER

Greg Holford BA ’80, MFA ’82

WHEN GREG HOLFORD BA ’80, MFA ’82 first set foot on the USC campus, he was actually an English major. But with insatiable interests in music, art and technology, it wasn’t long before he ended up as the musical director for an on-campus production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was during this stint that School of Dramatic Arts professor John Blankenchip noticed Holford’s artistic spark, especially his talent for storytelling, and crafted a plan to expedite the student’s theatre education so he could direct on a larger scale.

Now, after a 35-year career of creating and directing themed experiences and spectaculars globally, Holford has seen it all.

His projects hold world records in media projection, aerial technology and more, and he has led pioneering research in pyro drone innovation and execution. His internationally renowned indoor spectacular, Fantasea of a Kingdom at Phuket Fantasea in Thailand, has run for 22 years, and is still celebrated for its use of technology and narrative.

Most recently, Holford served as creative director of the Diriyah Gate Project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, inaugurating the new UNESCO World Heritage Site; and as creative director of a series of shows at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai for Amway China. He received the Production Innovation Award from the School in the fall for his artistry in the field.

“The School of Dramatic Arts embraced me and ingrained two big things: never stop dreaming of what you can create, and never stop learning,” he says. “I started off knowing nothing. Now, I look at what’s going on worldwide.”

As an undergraduate in the theatre program, Holford directed several shows. One of his favorites was Working, a musical based on the book by Studs Terkel, where he met alumnus Forest Whitaker ’82. He also recalls directing Elizabeth Swados’ Runaways, which toured that summer to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Holford remembers his time at Edinburgh fondly — the responsibility of switching quickly from sound design to props management and beyond widened his director’s perspective. One year, he even performed in the festival production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

An early innovator, Holford started a variety show at USC called Rock Theatre, which blended musical theatre and rock genres and lived beyond his tenure as a student. He even directed an early stage adaptation of Fame in his senior year, and went on to earn an MFA in directing at the School before moving on to the big leagues. For Holford, SDA was a safe place to experiment, to build expertise and confidence that prepared him for the scale of his career after graduation.

“When you do your first multi-million dollar show on the outside, you have to get it right. That’s one of the luxuries of USC. You didn’t have to get it all right; you could make mistakes, and learn from them,” he says.

Whether the alumnus is working with 20 students on campus or thousands of performers, lights, drones and projections broadcast worldwide, Holford keeps the story at the center. His dramatic training taught him the value of storytelling, even at the most expansive scale.

“No matter how technically complex it is, it’s about telling a story and telling it well, in a creative way,” he says.

Almost 40 years after graduating, Holford looks back fondly at his SDA education. He recalls inspiring meetings with alumni and professors who were active in the entertainment industry. Their paths, he says, showed him the possibility of succeeding in a career he loved, telling stories for audiences around the world.

“You have to have the foundation; the foundation allows you to reach out into the future,” he says. “I never forget where I came from.” 

BY CELINE KINER

Grant Heslov BFA ’86

GRANT HESLOV BFA ACTING ’86 is an actor, director, writer and producer who has earned Academy, Producers Guild, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, among others.

And he can pinpoint where the momentum for his career began: on USC’s campus.

“The fall of 1982, I still remember meeting my classmates for the first time at the fountain outside Bing Theatre,” Heslov recounts. “There was just an excitement and sense of possibility we all felt. It was the freedom that comes with being on your own for the first time. And the newfound access we had to all these brilliant minds and amazing resources that we’d never studied before.”

Heslov is still great friends with several classmates he met that first day. That includes fellow SDA alumnus Tate Donovan BFA ’86, who was featured in a video tribute to Heslov that was shown at the School of Dramatic Arts’ 75th anniversary benefit last September. Another actor featured in that tribute video was George Clooney, who also met Heslov in 1982 — fortuitously, as Clooney recalls. Back then, Clooney bummed $100 off Heslov to pay for some head shots. It was a sound investment on Heslov’s part, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

“He is a consummate friend,” Clooney says of Heslov. “And what you should all know about your former student is that he makes the world better. … He is a really good man.”

In 2006, Heslov and Clooney founded Smokehouse Pictures. It’s in recognition of how their company has supported emerging talent that Heslov and Smokehouse Pictures earned SDA’s 2021 Corporate Leadership Award — an award that honors a company or producer who consistently puts the quality of the actor “front and center.” Since teaming up, Heslov and Clooney have written, directed and produced films — including Good Night and Good Luck (nominated for six Academy Awards), Leatherheads, The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Ides of March, The Monuments Men, Argo (winner of the 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture), Money Monster, Our Brand is Crisis, Suburbicon and The Midnight Sky.

“When it comes to developing trust and relationships with actors, it starts with the material,” Heslov says. “Developing material that attracts good actors. Working with good directors who attract good actors.

“But it’s also about creating a good set. We keep working with people if we love their work and their working style. Nobody wants to work with a pain in the ass. Do great work and be nice. That’s it.”

As Heslov’s career expanded into directing and producing, what he learned during his acting studies at USC remained as relevant as ever.

“It was in college where I first learned how to analyze plays and scripts,” he says. “That’s something I still apply every single day. Plus, being an actor myself gives me greater insight on how to talk to actors, treat actors, and know what good acting looks like, in my own opinion, at least.”

Heslov also credits his BFA for helping him understand, early, all that goes into making a play or film.

“We didn’t just act,” he says, “we were building sets, doing lighting, costumes, voice. You learn all of it. And it all turns into real-world application. In fact, as soon as we graduated, some of us started a theatre company of our own in L.A. We built our own sets, we raised our own money, we recruited the casts. I was learning how to be a producer right away.”

So, what would Heslov’s USC-student-self think of the industry heights he’s achieved since that first day at the fountain outside of Bing Theatre?

“He’d be proud, I think,” Heslov says. “Probably a little surprised. I mean, my goal was just to be a working actor. Just make a living as an actor. I couldn’t imagine anything beyond that back then. That would have been enough. I just wanted to be doing plays, TV, movies, anything. Having someone, anyone, want to pay to watch you act, to watch you perform your craft, that’s all you really care about as an artist. Everything beyond that is a bonus.” 

BY PHILLIP JORDAN