Lotte Lenya
Lotte Lenya ( born October 18, 1898 in Vienna as Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer, † November 27, 1981 in New York; Lotte Lenya ) was an Austrian- American actress and singer.
- 2.1 Literature
- 2.2 Broadcasting
Life
Youth and successes in the Weimar Republic
Lotte Lenya grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Vienna ( 14, 38 Ameisgasse; since 2003 plaque ) in poor circumstances. The mother was a washerwoman, the father addicted to alcohol coachman. In 1913 she came as a 15 -year-old to Zurich to live with an aunt, but she did not take up the long term. Nevertheless Blamauer remained in Zurich and was first ballet dancer, then an actress. By 1921 she was living in Zurich, where she stood, together with the almost the same Elisabeth Bergner on stage, cloakroom informed before moving to Berlin.
Also in 1921 she took her stage name. However, the expected results could be long in coming. They participated in the world premiere of the first joint piece by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, the Singspiel Mahagonny, 1927 in Baden -Baden as a singer. At the premiere of The Threepenny Opera, 1928, she played the role of Jenny, but this was in the program simply forgotten. Also in the film version of GW Pabst, 1931, she was seen in that role. Another success for Lenya was the Berlin performance of the opera Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny 1931. 1932 she played in this piece in Vienna and met the tenor Otto Pasetti know who was her lover until 1934. This led to the temporary separation of Weill.
Marriage and emigration
Through his friendship with the dramatist Georg Kaiser, she learned in 1924 the young composer Kurt Weill know. At the request of the Emperor brought Lenya Kurt Weill, who had accepted an invitation Emperor to discuss the joint cooperation, at the station in Green Heath at Erkner ( south of Berlin ) from. Lenya ran a rowing boat on the Peetzsee to the station and Weill rowed across the lake to the house Georg Kaiser.
Shortly thereafter, Weill and Lenya began a romantic relationship. In May 1925, Georg Kaiser offered both his apartment on Luis Platz 3 in Berlin; this was the beginning of their life together. In 1926 she got married to prepare the gossip to an end, as Lenya told later.
In early 1933 ranged Lotte Lenya for divorce from Kurt Weill, who emigrated to the Nazi "seizure of power " to Paris. In June 1933, Lenya and Pasetti occurred on The Seven Deadly Sins of Weill and Brecht at the Paris premiere of the sung ballet. Weill emigrated to Paris in the same year, was able to rescue Lenya Weill's possessions in part before the confiscation by the Nazi regime; she then lived with Pasetti until the summer of 1934, when the affair came to an end on the French Riviera.
Lenya then had a brief affair with the painter Max Ernst, but returned in April 1935 Kurt Weill back, avowedly to stay with him. They lived first in London. In the summer of 1935, Weill was followed by a commitment to Salzburg, from where he Lenya announced his decision to travel to the United States. He invited her to come with him.
In the United States
Weill and Lenya in 1935 left Europe together from Cherbourg. They reached to the RSS Majestic on September 10, 1935 New York City. In January 1937, she got married at the registry office of Westchester County for the second time.
Lenya sang in nightclubs in New York, starred in The Eternal Road, a monumental drama to which Weill had composed the music, and went on theater tour across the USA, while her husband worked musicals with Maxwell Anderson and Ira Gershwin. She also starred in pieces their neighbors Maxwell Anderson, who was one of the most successful playwrights of the 1930s.
After a failure in Weill's operetta The Firebrand of Florence in 1945, she retired as an actress largely back because they saw no other chance of success because of their accent.
After the death Weill, 1950, is Lenya took care of his estate. Her second husband, George Davis, persuaded her to return to the stage. They played again the Jenny in The Threepenny Opera, this time on Broadway, in the English language, and with as great success as in the late 1920s in Berlin. Leonard Bernstein had enforced this new translation in a concert performance in Boston.
Returning to Germany
Mid-1950s, she returned to appearances returned to Germany and took, among others, the opera Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny, The Threepenny Opera, The Seven Deadly Sins and many individual numbers on the record. Her voice was compared to their first recordings in 1930, sunk very deeply into the alto register, and she could many songs and songs for high voice no longer present in the original version. Conductor of the recordings was Wilhelm Brückner - Ruggeberg for Lenya new einrichtete among others the part of Jenny in Mahagonny opera, actually a soprano part. In the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen she appeared in the 1960s as Mother Courage.
Later years
In later years, Lotte Lenya made a name for himself as a film actress in Hollywood. She played on the side of Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty in the movie The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Particularly well known she was in the role of ex-KGB officer Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia with Love (1963). In the theater, she starred in the premiere of the musical theater in the 1960s, the role of Fraulein Schneider.
In 1978 she had her last performances. At that time she was already suffering from cancer, what she died three years later in New York.
2002 in Vienna in the 14th district, named in the quarter of their childhood, Lotte Lenya - Square.