Tilla Durieux

Tilla Durieux
Tilla Durieux, 1905
Born	Ottilie Godefroy (1880-08-18)18 August 1880 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	21 February 1971(1971-02-21) (aged 90) West Berlin, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1902–1970
Spouse(s)	Eugene Spiro (m.1904–div.1906) Paul Cassirer (m.1910–div.1926) Ludwig Katzenellenbogen (m.1930–1944; his death)

Tilla Durieux (born Ottilie Godefroy; 18 August 1880 – 21 February 1971) was an Austrian theatre and film actress of the first decades of the 20th century.

Biography

Born Ottilie Godefroy on 18 August 1880, the daughter of the Austrian chemist Richard Godefroy (1847–1895), she trained as an actress in Vienna, her native town, and made her debut at the Moravian Theatre in Olmütz (Olomouc) in 1901/02. The next season she got an engagement in Breslau (Wrocław). From 1903 she worked with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and with a group of expressionist artists around Kurt Hiller and Jakob van Hoddis. In 1911 Durieux entered the stage of the Lessing Theater where, on 1 November 1913, she became the second actress to perform the role Eliza Doolittle in a German language production of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, half a year before its English premiere on 11 April 1914. From 1915 she performed at the Royal Schauspielhaus Berlin.

In 1904, Durieux married the Berlin Secession painter Eugen Spiro, and after their divorce, she remarried in 1910 the successful art dealer and editor Paul Cassirer, who committed suicide in a room next to the court room that pronounced their divorce. Soon after, Durieux married general director Ludwig Katzenellenbogen. In 1927 they were the main financiers of Erwin Piscator's Neues Schauspielhaus project. Durieux was a public character of 1920s Berlin and associated with numerous celebrities like the famous photographer Frieda Riess.

In 1933, Durieux and her husband left Germany for Switzerland to escape Nazi rule. She continued to perform at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt and in Prague. In 1937 she moved to Zagreb, Croatia (then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) where she became a member of the International Red Aid. Durieux unsuccessfully tried to obtain visa for the United States; in 1941 Ludwig Katzenellenbogen was arrested by Gestapo agents in Thessaloniki and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was killed in 1944.

Durieux returned to West Germany in 1952, appearing on stages in Berlin, Hamburg and Münster.

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1914	Der Flug in die Sonne
1915	Die Launen einer Weltdame
1920	Die Verschleierte
1921	Hashish, the Paradise of Hell	Sultanin
1921	Der zeugende Tod	Boroka, Malerin
1922	The Blood
1929	Woman in the Moon	Fünf Gehirne und Scheckbücher
1953	The Stronger Woman	Mutter der Fürstin
1954	The Last Bridge	Mara
1956	The Story of Anastasia	Zarenmutter Maria Feodorowna von Russland
1957	Von allen geliebt	Frau Avenarius
1957	El Hakim	Mutter des Hussni
1958	Resurrection	Die Alte
1959	Labyrinth	Schwester Celestine
1959	Morgen wirst du um mich weinen	Tante Ermelin
1961	Barbara	Armgart
1964	Verdammt zur Sünde	Die Großmutter
1966	It	Die Alte aus dem Osten

External links

• Media related to Tilla Durieux at Wikimedia Commons
• Tilla Durieux at IMDb
• Tilla Durieux at the Internet Broadway Database
• KGFOYVIVTilla Durieux and her Art Collection
• Portrait of Tilla Durieux painted by Renoir: Metropolitan Museum of Art