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MURPHY'S LAW

[[image - photograph of Donna Murphy by Anita and Steve Shevett]]

For Donna Murphy, acting is about challenge, and she has met her latest-as Fosca in Passion-with a courageous, uncompromising and Tony-winning performance

The eyes are ravishingly intelligent, big and bluish green, this day more green than blue. The hair is closely cut, carefully sculptured, a glistening reddish-brown. The face is round, leaning toward oval, and sensitively attractive; it could conceivably belong to a Madonna in a Renaissance painting.

The first thing you notice about Donna Murphy is that she looks nothing like Fosca, the intensely unattractive and fatally ill nineteenth-century woman she plays in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Passion, a portrayal for which she has received this year's Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical.

The show has won the Tony for Best Musical, as well as for Best Book and Score, and this day Murphy is sitting backstage at the Plymouth Theatre, surrounded by the telegrams, letters and cards from well-wishers that flank her brightly lit dressing-room mirror, talking about the character she plays, the career she has fashioned and, first of all, the Tony she has won.

"I was kind of numb," she says of Tony night. "I remember I stood up and kissed Dee Hoty, who is a friend and was also nominated, and I didn't kiss my husband. I kind of sailed onstage. I felt about ten years old. I was in a gown and had a lot of make-up on, but I felt as if I was ten. When I got to the microphone, my first impulse was to find my mom and dad in the mezzanine and let them know I knew

by Mervyn Rothstein

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[[image - photograph of Saab 900 SE Turbo Coupe]]

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[[image - photograph of Saab 900 Convertible]]

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[[image - Saab Logo]] SAAB

Saab is helping to fight AIDS. TO find out how you can turn your ticket stub into a $1,000 donation to Broadway Cares, turn to page 40.
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