Helene Weigel
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Refimprove Script error: No such module "infobox".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".Template:Main otherScript error: No such module "Check for clobbered parameters".Template:Wikidata image
Helene Weigel (Script error: No such module "IPA".; 12 May 1900Template:Spaced ndash6 May 1971)[1] was an Austrian actress and artistic director.[2] She was the second and last wife of Bertolt Brecht until his death in 1956; together they had two children.
Personal life
Weigel was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the daughter of Leopoldine (née Pollak) and Siegfried Weigel, an accountant-general in a textile factory.[1] Her family was Jewish.[1] She and husband Brecht had two children, Stefan Brecht and Barbara Brecht-Schall. Weigel was a Communist Party member from 1930.[1]
Career
Weigel became the artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble on 16 February 1949.Script error: No such module "Unsubst". She is best remembered for creating several Brecht roles, including: Pelagea Vlassova, The Mother of 1932; Antigone in Brecht's version of the Greek tragedy; the title role in his civil war play, Señora Carrar's Rifles; and the iconic Mother Courage.Script error: No such module "Unsubst".
Between 1933 and 1947, as a refugee from Adolf Hitler's Germany, she was seldom able to pursue her acting craft, even during the family's six-year period in Los Angeles.Script error: No such module "Unsubst". It was only with the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble in East Germany in 1949 that Brecht's theatre began to be recognized worldwide.Script error: No such module "Unsubst". She died in 1971, still at the helm of the company, and many of the roles that she created with Brecht are still in the theatre's repertoire today.Script error: No such module "Unsubst".
Death
Weigel died in East Berlin on 6 May 1971, six days before her 71st birthday.[1]
Notable understudies
- Ingrid Pitt, British-Polish actress
References
External links
- Berliner Ensemble
- Jennifer Marston Willia, Biography of Helene Weigel, Jewish Women Encyclopedia
- Template:Trim/ Template:PAGENAMEBASE at IMDbTemplate:EditAtWikidataScript error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".
- Pages with script errors
- Pages with broken file links
- 1900 births
- 1971 deaths
- Actresses from Vienna
- Austrian Jews
- Austrian emigrants to Germany
- Communist Party of Germany politicians
- Jewish socialists
- Socialist Unity Party of Germany politicians
- Members of the Provisional Volkskammer
- Cultural Association of the GDR members
- East German women in politics
- 20th-century Austrian actresses
- Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
- Recipients of the National Prize of East Germany
- Recipients of the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold
- Family of Bertolt Brecht
- Burials at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery