Elisabeth Bergner Biography

Elisabeth Bergner (August 22, 1897 " May 12, 1986) was a film and stage actress.

Life and career

She was born Elisabeth Ettel in Drohobycz, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Drohobych, Ukraine) to Anna Rosa (née Wagner) and Emil Ettel, a merchant. Her parents were secular Jews.

She went on stage when fourteen years old and began acting in Innsbruck at the age of 15. In Vienna at age 16 she toured Austrian and German provinces with a Shakespearean company. She worked as an artist's model, posing for sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who fell in love with her. She eventually moved to Munich and later Berlin.

In 1923 she made her film debut in Der Evangelimann. With the rise of Nazism, Bergner moved to London with director Paul Czinner, and they married in 1933. Her stage work in London included The Boy David (1936) by J.M. Barrie, his last play, which he wrote especially for her, and Escape Me Never by Margaret Kennedy. Catherine the Great was banned in Germany because of the government's racial policies, reported Time Magazine on March 26, 1934.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for Escape Me Never (1935). She repeated her stage role of Rosalind, opposite Laurence Olivier's Orlando, in the 1936 film As You Like It, the first sound film version of Shakespeare's play, and the first sound film of any Shakespeare play filmed in England. Miss Bergner had previously only played the role on the German stage, and several critics found that her accent got in the way of their enjoyment of the film, which was not a success. She returned intermittently to the stage, for instance in the title role of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi in 1946.

In 1973 she starred in the Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winner for Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film of 1974, Der Fußgänger (English title: The Pedestrian). The film was directed by Austrian actor-director Maximilian Schell, and starred Peggy Ashcroft, Käthe Haack, Lil Dagover and Françoise Rosay. She temporarily returned to Germany in 1954, where she acted in movies and on the stage; the Berlin district of Steglitz named a city park after her. Later she moved to London, where she died, at age 88.

All About Eve

Bergner is considered by several critics to be the inspiration for the character of Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's classic film, All About Eve. Bergner had a real-life incident about a would-be Eve Harrington when Bergner was performing in the play The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1943). Bergner helped a young actress, and the actress "took over" Bergner's life. Bergner recounted the story to writer Mary Orr, who based a short story "The Wisdom of Eve" (1946) in Cosmopolitan magazine on Bergner's experience. In Orr's original short story, unlike the comeuppance ending required by the Hollywood Production Code for the film, the Eve Harrington character gets away with everything, and is last seen heading to Hollywood with a "thousand dollar a week contract in her pocketbook".

Bibliography

• Anne Jespersen: Toedliche Wahrheit oder raffinierte Taeuschung. "Die Frauen in den Filmen Elisabeth Bergners" in Michael Omasta, Brigitte Mayr, Christian Cargnelli (eds.): Carl Mayer, Scenarist: Ein Script von ihm war schon ein Film " "A script by Carl Mayer was already a film". Synema, Vienna 2003; ISBN 3-901644-10-5 (German/English)

Selected filmography

• The Fiddler of Florence (1926)
• Doña Juana (1927)
• Fräulein Else (1929)
• Ariane (1931)
• Dreaming Lips (1932)
• The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934)
• Escape Me Never (1935)
• As You Like It (1936)
• Dreaming Lips (1937)
• Stolen Life (1939)
• 49th Parallel (1941)
• Paris Calling (1941)
• Strogoff (1970)
• Cry of the Banshee (1970)
• High Society Limited (1982)

See also

• List of German-speaking Academy Award winners and nominees